Sleep Dirt

Extremely Quiet and Incredibly Far Away

2012-01-17T12:42:00.000-05:00

Last night, late -- I realized something was wrong. Nothing was on fire, there were no loud noises or alarm bells. There was just this sense that the picture I was looking at, the movie I was living in was missing an element. I couldn't put my finger on it at first, but there was just this nagging feeling..

The thing about relationships, the thing that makes them so powerful for people are the ways that they resonate when the other person isn't there. How much you miss them, or really to be more specific -- how much they seem to be a silent presence anyways. You can spend endless hours with someone and have it be powerful, but when you find yourself contentedly alone just knowing that the thought of them is close, like an invisible warmth in your mind, wrapped around you like a comfortable shirt or blanket..

Nothing hurts more than when that blanket is ripped away and you're left bare to the cold.

Long distance relationships. People with separate lives and only the most occasional of contact. I cannot always touch you, but we have the phone, the Internet, and the feeling between us that our hearts are there. It's not ideal, but sometimes it's all we have.

At the same time -- when you build something from radiated heat, when the warmth comes from light years away and it takes time to get there, it can be just as hard to let go. Just as difficult to recognize or accept that what started as a scalding hot bath has gradually become simply comfortably warm.

People ask me why I hang onto things, why I connect with people I cannot touch, talk to, or even know beyond words on a screen, a handful of fading letters, or the images in my mind..

It's like caring for a cat. The animal doesn't really need you. The instincts are hard-wired, the skills always available at a moment's notice, regardless of whether it's been outside or not. Cats don't often give affection as much as they allow you to give it to them. And even then, it's just as likely that the food bowl is empty or you're just the warmest thing to sleep next to on a chilly January evening.

But like any other pet, you connect with them on some level. You feel an affection from them, even if it's not as direct or clearly enunciated as it might be with others. Cats don't wag their tails when you come home. Cats don't always want to feel your hand petting them, even if you've lived in the same space long enough to know where the best spots are to scratch. Even after all these years, I still get my share of bites, scratches, and utter yawning disinterest from the one who's stayed with me since she was a kitten.

Long distance relationships. Torches held. Candles burning down to nothing.

I suppose if you've never been a part of something like this it makes as much sense as a dead animal left on a porch step as a gift.

Sometime last night, probably when I was helping my son carry his scooter down the stairs from my apartment to the street below, one of my cats slipped out the open door. She does this sometimes, as she likes to rub against the corners to mark them with her scent.

Most evenings when it's just me in the place, the cats sleep in little hiding places. Then when I finally retire for the evening they eventually make their way over and curl up against me. Territorial rules apply. Aja sleeps in the crook of my arm, Seka curls up against my side.

It was only when she didn't appear that I started to connect the dots.

And then suddenly everything around me felt very, very cold.

I walked around the parking lots and nearby woods for what seemed like ages. Shining a flashlight into the darkness looking for a tiny twin reflection back. Knowing in the pit of my stomach that she had probably been gone for hours at this point. That even if she was somewhere nearby that the odds of me finding her again were so utterly stacked against me. That in all reality when she stepped out of that door this time she had no intention of stepping back into the apartment once she had marked all the corners.

People will tell me it's just a cat. A pet. That when you really think about it -- she was never really mine to begin with -- that she was a free spirit, that her time with me was of her own choosing just as much as her decision to leave, to stop calling every day, or to open her heart to the warmth of someone else.

But I miss her. I miss her warmth.
And I wish.. I just wish she would come back.

[Now Playing: Textures - "Reaching Home" ]

The Friday Hot Sheet

2012-01-06T16:02:00.001-05:00

Coming up to the end of a short week at work after a short holiday break -- right on the cusp of a new year. But the older I get and the more of these new years I find myself walking into, the more I start to feel like there's only so much difference between a new year and say ..last Wednesday.

Maybe that sounds pessimistic, but seeing each new year as some new chapter or book entirely doesn't seem to fit anymore. It's just a long perspective of waves and valleys -- circumstances, attempted solutions, and consequences -- lather, rinse, and repeat.

That being said, I am glad to be writing again, and there are some things that I'm looking forward to in this next circuit of waves and valleys that I sort of lost track of during the last 12. First and foremost the fact that I'm writing (blogging) again, which I'm really happy about. But what would a return to blogging be without the hot sheet?

So before things get crazy again and I do one of those "sorry I haven't been posting" posts -- here are this weeks risers and fallers, and the buzz as it looks from here.

The State of the Union So, how are things with me? Eh, they're getting there. Money is an issue, which is more my fault than anyone's -- but finding a solution to it has proven really, really frustrating (hello acid reflux, didn't think you were coming back). But I've met some really awesome people in the past few months, and despite dark clouds here and there -- there are some very cool things I'm hoping to get to in the next few months. I'm registered to be in the River Run again for the first time in several years, and as my writing gets more active, I'm hoping to spread it around a little more and possibly try to make a few shekels with it too. Nothing written in stone yet, but lets see what develops.

Mohr Stories Like a lot of you out there these days, I spend a good part of my weekly headphone time with podcasts as well as music. One that I've started to really dig into and enjoy the most this week has been Jay Mohr's Mohr Stories. I've always been wishy-washy about Mohr, because I've always liked his comedy -- but then he does a guest host slot on Jim Rome's show and I start to think he's sort of an douche. But his podcast lives somewhere between those two poles, as he interviews comedians and friends about the industry -- and frequently veers off on tangents filled with movie quotes and impressions.

His wife, actress and super crush object Nikki Cox [pictured] is usually around too, and although I hate him for marrying her away from me (even if she didn't know it) there's something in the way they banter off each other that I really like. It's like having dinner with a couple that really loves each other and coming away from it not wanting to utterly puke your guts out because all they could do was make goo-goo eyes at each other. The other thing about Mohr that I enjoy (especially in podcast form) is how he genuinely enjoys laughing at even the smallest, silliest things -- which a lot of comedians don't always do. If you like comedy-based podcasts, but maybe need a different flavor than Marc Maron's self-depreciation, I'd highly suggest giving this one a try (hint: start with the Patrice O'Neal episode -- great stuff).
The Iowa Caucuses, etc. There's a point of saturation with political crap, especially in this world of 24-hour news cycles and re-tweeted opinions. Frankly I was sort of sick of all the republican hopefuls and their seeming lack of focused ideology by the zillionth debate in a row, but as we get closer and closer to the real thing, it's hard to look away. It's no secret people are fed up with the way the economy is and that most of them place their blame with Obama, but do they really think any of these candidates are going to be the ones to knock him off? The issues seem muddled, like no one really knows what to say or how hard to commit to anything too far lest it become a rope to hang themselves with (*koff* *koff* Herman Cain *koff*). Honestly, standing on the other side of the fence as I mostly am -- none of these people seem like the real bad guy in this movie plot. Like they're the henchmen, and Cobra Commander is going to show up in the 3rd act and say "Vote for me!"

The good part about that I suppose is that my guy (at least for now) seems like he has a clear shot at re-election. But like Don Cheadle said in tweeted response to criticism he got for wishing Obama was more "gangsta" as a president -- I think a lot of people felt let down by Obama's seeming lack of definitive policy moves. And to be honest -- my worry is that if he gets in a cakewalk election against a Ron Paul or a Rick Perry, where is Barack going to feel the motivation to do anything different? Politicians (and Obama certainly is one) rarely change their course without sufficient cause, and I think a lot of us are hoping that Obama has to fight like hell for re-election, and in doing so will get the fire back in his belly that we were hoping he'd have from the start.

Sevendust One of my absolute favorite bands, the Atlanta rockers played a packed house concert the night before New Years Eve in Jacksonville (for almost the last decade they've hosted a NYE concert in Orlando at the House of Blues), and it was incredible. Some bands just understand how to bring it live, even when the bigger show is right around the corner or there's other things going on in their lives (one of their crew members had committed suicide a few days before the show -- they dedicated a song to him, but never let up their intensity despite that tragic news). I hadn't been in a mosh pit in a while, hadn't been in a superloud concert in a while -- and the combination of the two had me giddy in a way that reminded me that good times happen when you get out and go to them. Too much of the past year has been spent in the same places waiting for the excitement to show up there, and surprise surprise -- it rarely if ever happened.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo I saw this during Christmas break, and it's sort of old news now -- but I haven't had much chance to talk about it. Unfortunately, most of my criticism of the film is too spoiler-y to share here without ruining it for anyone who hasn't seen it, but I was surprised at how much the movie didn't make me forget the original Swedish film. The Fincher version has a fantastic look, and if you haven't seen the Swedish version or you know nothing about the series definitely see it, but what I came away with most was a feeling that I'd already seen all of this before (like almost too exactly close to the other version) for me to feel any differently about it. The real difference of course was the actress playing the titular Lisbeth Salander character, and while I thought Rooney Mara did a fantastic job, she played the character as eventually more vulnerable than Noomi Rapace did, which made some of the key moments seem less.. powerful than they did the first time I saw it done. Still a good movie, but not in any way the game changer they tried to make it out to be.

Shit [insert name of group here] Say One of the things that made me originally stray away from doing the Hot Sheet (full confession time here) was that it was hard to find cool things during the week that everyone hadn't already seen by Friday. Sometimes it's unavoidable, especially with how fast the web moves -- but I like for the things I write about to at least have a little fresh snap to them (hence the blog post I did about Kim Kardashian earlier this week). With that in mind it seemed like a bad idea to post any of the "Shit Girls Say" "Shit Black Guys Say" "Shit Gay Guys Say" "Shit White Girls Say (to Black Girls)" [which might be the best one yet, btw] -- since they went viral over the past week or two. If you haven't seen them, definitely Google them now -- but then come back here, because I've got the best one yet riiiiight here.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

[Listening to: The Nuns – "Do You Want Me On My Knees?" ]

You Probably Think This Song is About You

2012-01-05T22:07:00.000-05:00

I don't want to get into this too deep, because there's too many calories burned on her already and we've heard it all before (no talent, fame whore, blah blah blah..) -- but I came across this picture on tumblr earlier this evening (hence the double post), and couldn't get over just how even though the basic idea of this woman is bothersome to me, just how stunning this image is in a Page 6/Maxim magazine sort of way.

So here's my question:

Seriously, look at this picture.

Think of some of Kim Kardashian's other posed and planned photographs. Not papparazi pics of her walking around LA or publicity shoots -- I'm talking about the ones where she knows there's a camera on her. Say whatever else you want about her, how in the hell did she not just end up as a model?

Think about this for a second, how is it that we don't already organically know Kim Kardashian as one of those girls doing that Victoria's Secret TV gig, or hawking light beer and showing up in Adam Sandler movies like other models do?

And the only answer I can come up with is that girl must be insanely lazy. Smarts help as a model, but you don't need them. There are plenty of dumbasses walking runway. But if you're gonna make real money in that life, you've gotta put in the work (my ex-wife was in the industry, not even seriously big time -- and there was a period where we drove all over for shoots).

Kim Kardashian never had to become a blight on our pop culture radar. She could have done this all day, hung out all day with Adriana Lima and Brooklyn Decker and hawked for Loreal and showed up in Sports Illustrated once a year in a swimsuit, and she could have still been rich, still been famous, still bang athletes, and never had to deal with whatever else she (sarcastic voice on 10) "has to deal with."

I don't watch the show, so I don't know any deeper context, and frankly I don't care -- but goddamn, look at this picture. 15 years ago this is a poster in my college apartment and I don't effing care what basketball player she's dating.

Girl is lazy.

(article reposted @O Hell Nawl 1/6/2012)

[Now Playing: Company of Thieves - "Death of Communication" ]

5 Artists I Discovered in 2011

2012-01-04T13:29:00.000-05:00

When I'm not doing my Clark Kent thing on this blog, I put on my cape and tights so I can review albums as part of the OHN staff. It's a great gig, supremely cool people to work with and readers who don't mind digging deep into longer-form reviews than you normally find online. Plus it exposes me to a lot of music I might not otherwise take the time to check into.

Early last week I posted my Best of 2011 list.

I feel pretty good about my picks, even though I had to make some tough calls (Kendrick Lamar, Anthrax, and Common could have been on there, but I wanted to keep it short). But the thing about that list is that the way we set things up, it's limited only to albums that came out in the past year. And although there was good music that came out in the past 12 months, that's not always how I discover music.

I'm getting to an age where it would be perfectly fine for me to settle on a huddled grouping of favorite artists gathered over the years of me listening and playing music -- but I'm pretty glad to say that I still have a healthy appetite for new sounds and artists.

Not that I live on the leading edge or anything, but I want to see what else is out there -- find out what (if anything) I'm missing out on. In this new era of social media music sites and on-demand streaming, obviously things have gotten a lot easier in that respect, but when I hear friends or journalists or musicians I like and respect raving about something, it's pretty natural for me to want to check it out.

I also still (for whatever reason) find myself interested and yet baffled by Grammy winners and the names that show up on most other "Best Of" lists. I often complain to a friend of mine that I'll check out the album reviews on the Onion AV Club only to realize that I have never heard of any of the bands they're talking about.

"New music is a young man's game," He'll always say.

And yet, every year it seems I do discover and obsess for a little while over a handful of new things, many of which turn out to not be all that new to begin with. There's so much great music out there that it's easy to miss it the first time around. Better late than never, right?

So here, in no particular order are 5 artists I found this year for the first time that I really dug (that you might like too):

1. Emmure:

We used to call it the "boom button" -- that switch that some songs have when they kick in to just grab you and shove you back in your seat. There's a lot of interesting new metal out there -- bands like MyChildren MyBride, Revocation, and Skeletonwitch -- but time and time again I kept coming back to Emmure. This is a mosh pit I definitely want in on.

2. Company of Thieves (the video is longer than the song, not sure what's up with that):

Part Portishead, Part Jeff Buckley, All awesome -- I hate that I wasn't the one that found this band before anyone else. Instead I picked up a thread about it from Chez Pazienza's blog, and was instantly hooked. They have two albums out to date, and both are all kinds of worth your time, but what's really exciting about these guys is just how much richer the second disc is from the first. They're not only good -- they're getting better.

3. Animals as Leaders:

Tosin Abasi is a beast. Last year I discovered Guthrie Govan's guitar playing and thought to myself, "Really, where else can it go from here?" But man, did I overload on this band this year. It's aggressive, complex, prog-spirited and yet heavy as hell. I could seriously listen to this guy play all day long.
4. Envy on the Coast:

During the early part of my time on Tumblr I came across a post where a girl tagged a song by these guys as her "Favorite song to strip to." That alone was worth a listen, but what I found was even better. There's an dusting of emo to these guys (and their fans) that I initially cringed at a bit, but there's such a snarl to the music these guys make that it's easy to find your way past it. Kinda mad they broke up before I even found out about them, but that's how it goes sometimes.

5. Mastodon:

I have no idea why I've slept on Mastodon so long. I've known about them for years but just never really took the time to check them out. Then during one of those breaks this year where I had all sorts of music around but somehow everything seemed stale I decided to give their latest album a shot. Several back-to-back listens later I was utterly hooked. Rich guitar lines, lockstep drums, and psychedelic vocals rife with hooks -- if the Phonte and Childish Gambino discs hadn't come along when they did I might still be listening to this 24/7.

So what were the artists that you discovered this year? Not necessarily just new voices from this year -- but just the things you found yourself listening to the most that weren't from your core group of favorites?

And no, this doesn't count.

[Now Playing: Tinie Tempah - "Pass Out" ]

At Least the Coffee's Free

2011-12-23T10:46:00.000-05:00

I've posted this one before, but it's a classic -- and here I am again, so why not.

Got a little more shopping to try and finish today -- hopefully they'll let us out a little early.

Happy Holidays, gang.

[Now Playing: Common - "Celebrate" ]

Nothing's In the Flowers

2011-12-22T23:37:00.000-05:00

A buddy of mine who came face to face with this phenomena posted this on a social network that was founded by a guy pretty much because of something like this (if movies are to be believed) a day or so after I once again found myself in this position.

To say this is always the case or that there's never an exception to any rule is probably like the idea of minority students at Utah State University -- You have to assume there are some, but it's kinda hard to tell from the video.

[Now Playing: Evergreen Terrace - "New Friend Request" ]

Apocalypse Nao

2011-12-20T17:11:00.002-05:00

Every morning at work the team/department I'm a part of has a meeting. Issues are discussed, project statuses are updated, general company info is disseminated -- pretty standard corporate stuff. It's the one time of day when the team is guaranteed to see each other and interact -- but for the most part it's also the only time during the day when I see any of them at all.

After the meeting ended today one of the engineers comes up to me and says, "So, did you have fun at Toys 'R Us last night?"

At first I was a little creeped out, because how would he have known I was there at all? ..But then I sort of did the mental math and realized he must have been there too. Dude laughed it off like it was nothing, but apparently he waved, said my name, and even repeated it when I didn't initially respond. All of which made me feel like a complete heel, because I didn't hear shit.

My son is generally pretty cool about Christmas. He wants things like every other kid, and I've done my share of spoiling him over the years.. but when it comes to the season he almost always focuses on one or two things and if he gets those he's super happy.

This year though, he discovered a programmable robot by French scientists developed to further the study of robotics called a Nao robot. It does super cool robot things, features a child-like artificial intelligence, and can even dance.

The boy has always dug robots and instantly became sort of obsessed with these things, and naturally asked for one for Christmas. But it's not really something that you can just go and buy. The company that makes them sells them to schools for study projects, for a cool $20,000 a shot.

To be fair, I also saw one on eBay for $9000 -- but still, there's pretty much no way this thing is happening for Christmas.

My son had a backup choice in place, something a little more feasible (no spoilers, sorry). Things have been tight this year, but if I juggle a few things it seemed like I could probably swing it. Anyways, I spent the early part of last weekend scouting out this item, which I was able to find pretty easily. I couldn't get it yet until a check cleared, but since it was at several stores there wasn't going to be a problem.

Smash cut to last night, and NONE of those places have it anymore.

Since my financial situation in recent years has left me in a place where I've had to last-last minute shop before, I was somewhat prepared for this problem -- hence the scouting a few days before. So last night was spent largely in the process of running down the string of places where I'd scouted out to see if they had it. But of course as more and more of them didn't, my mood shifted from one of confidence to one of heightened urgency -- which is probably about the point I went storming through Toys 'R Us like a Terminator looking for Sarah Connor and completely blew off my coworker.

But you know what, buddy? In this season of peace and joy it's getting down to GO TIME and I don't really have the time to wave and smile and say "How 'bout them Tebows?"

I'm on a 'friggin mission here to make an 11 year-old smile, and your casual waving your hand and calling my name-itude is interfering with my general kick all other shoppers to the side and claim that thing my kid said he would like to have if Santa for some reason couldn't find a way to negotiate a dancing robot that makes Star Wars references out of those nerds in France!!

And you'll look back at me in shock and probably a little anger, and you'll probably say something like, "Are you crazy, Goddammit? Don't you think that's a little risky just for some toy?" -- at which point I'll look right back into your eyes and say,

Christmas don't surf!!

[Now Playing: Common - "Cloth" ]

Pickles

2011-12-19T10:36:00.005-05:00

Everyone tells you that you're a good listener, and because you are -- you listen attentively and look in their eyes while they say it. But what they're really saying is that you have no game. Being a good listener is essentially the opposite of having moves with the ladies.

It makes you wonder if they value your skills as a listener, or are just appreciative that you bother to listen at all. Because so many of the bad listeners out there – you know, those other guys women try to talk to, the ones who don't really take the time to understand or won’t hear what they're saying end up sleeping with them instead.

Women generally regret jumping into bed with bad listeners. You know this because you’re a good listener.

There's nothing wrong with caring about people, enjoying good conversation, or being a good friend. But the cold truth is that you would much rather be sleeping with this girl than hearing about her last relationship, and you're pretty sure she knows this fact. But you have no real angle to play, and she's equally aware of that too -- so it's this or nothing, pal.

And so a Sunday after a far-too late night Saturday stretches again into evening darkness. Either with or without friends around, you've spent the better part of the weekend with this girl. Not on a date or anything like that – you were just both around. And she likes you being around, because you’re a good listener – and also because she asked if she could have the pickle spear that came with your dinner, and you said yes. In between conversations with others, you catch her sticking her tongue out at you.

It probably means nothing.

Eventually the time comes to sign tabs and go home, but despite the smiling glances and playful shenanigans, there’s no real indication that she sees you any differently than she did before.

So when the group hints that they might go back out to another bar a little later, you say something about maybe joining in. But you don’t mean it, because you’re pretty sure they don’t mean it either. It’s been a long couple of days, and the gang seems pretty beat. But then as you're driving home on what seem like deserted streets, the phone lights up and buzzes in your pocket.

It’s not a text from the gang. It’s a text from her. Because you're a good listener you know that she was trying to choose between one or two places if everyone did decide to kick in for a second shift, so the text you got from her was surely one of many sent in succession to those who had been at dinner.

But you somehow get it in your head that she sent yours first.

You're tired. Close to broke. Your throat is killing you from a flu bug, lack of sleep, and whatever was in that last shot glass. The alarm at your apartment is set to go off early tomorrow morning to remind you that you have to go to work. Going to another bar, which could easily mean another bar after that is every kind of bad idea. Had one of the guys sent the group rally text you’d have likely waved it off with some sort of pleasant apology. But they didn't.

So you turn the car around. One bar becomes two. Two drinks become three. The guys never show; it’s just you and her. Hugs and a smile when you first reappear, her head on your shoulder as the night winds to a close.

Could these things have meant something else? Was there an opportunity there where some well-timed assertiveness might have done you some good? Just like so many times before with other people you more than liked who still only value how good a listener you are (and nothing else)?

You've long resigned yourself to the fact that more often than not, you friend-zone yourself. That even if those imagined moments did exist, even if somehow after spending the night being the guy in her life who didn't just take, take, take that it might have been OK for you to take a little -- you get stuck in this place where after listening to many hours of how she's tired of all the other guys who just want to fuck -- wouldn't suddenly turning into yet another one would be the worst kind of betrayal?

Yes, you want nothing more but to lean in and kiss her -- but didn't we just split an appetizer and sip on cocktails for hours on end discussing how much she hates when guys do that?

Your hope is that she makes the first move. That the attraction was there from the beginning to some level, so much so that even if she does appreciate your being a good listener, eventually she'll reach a point where she's done talking.

But more often what happens is that point comes along and you're supposed to know it. The conversation breaks, and she looks at you quietly. Perhaps steering a lock of hair behind her ear, perhaps not. Whatever the accompanying body language -- there's going to a point where she wonders if you're going to make a move. A point where she maybe wants you to make the move.

If you can see it coming and take advantage of it -- anything is possible.

But if you aren't sure if she even feels that way about you, or if you can't detect it until after the moment has come and gone -- then you're screwed. If there was a moment where you should have done something, but you didn't -- and how could you have possibly not have realized that was the moment..

The most important thing she was trying to tell you all night, and you weren't even paying attention.

..Some listener you are.

[Now Playing: Rick Ross - "Aston Martin Music" ]

Finicky

2011-12-15T12:57:00.021-05:00

Department Holiday Luncheon: Outlook invites, conference room tables lined up together with plastic sheets spread over them in Christmas colors. Ten dollars had be turned in by Wednesday afternoon because the meal would be catered, but feel free to bring a dessert dish if you want to.

I arrive late, but not so much that it was a problem. People were already eating, scattered at the tables; talking about families, football, and work.

The food is in aluminum trays lined up on a front table. Empty boxes with the name of a fancy chain Italian place are stacked up in a corner. There are paper plates and holiday-themed napkins half-in and half-out of their plastic wrapper.

In a way it's charming. Like a kid's birthday party hastily thrown together by a group of adults who are only loosely aligned with each other because of the kinds of work they do.

People are happy to see you, but there are only slivers of friendships between us. Not because of any animosity, but because all we really have together is work. Some folks on the team have relationships built from years of shared projects. Some knew each other in college, or started with the company around the same time. A few have just been here that long to where everybody knows them.

Teams like this are Gilligan's Islands. We're all in it together, but we have next to nothing in common. Still, people find a way to have things to talk about -- reasons to enjoy the moment.

Someone thought to get cups. No one thought to bring drinks.

The food isn't bad. Antipasto salads, vegetarian options, some sort of baked pasta with cheese thing. I take a little of each. Someone brings back vending machine sodas. Conversations continue over the sound of plastic forks meeting paper plates.

I don't even notice it at first. I'm really just focusing on the food in front of me. But then I realize that there are slices of yellow and orange bell peppers in my food; Peppers I am picking out with my fork and pushing to the side. It should be nothing: I don't like bell peppers in with my pasta. Cook them into the sauce, fine -- but don't put them in the dish, especially if it's just for the color.

It's just like I was telling you that first time you cooked for me and caught me picking them out and then you said..

And just like that.
Just like that.

I mean, what do you say? Where do you begin? Things like this happen all the time. Rings from the bottom of a glass on a countertop.

Wipe them clean, shut up already and get on with your life.

Stranger still, the actuality is that that flash of memory -- it lasts maybe a minute. Probably less. But these are the ones that get you. These are the ones you're not ready for. Because these are the times you can almost see the lines of sunlight against the curtains. You can almost feel your little dog's stare watching every move of my fork from the plate towards my mouth, hoping for something to fall.

Just wipe it away? Just clean the counter? When I can almost smell the shampoo in your hair and the lotion on your skin? Why would I ever want to leave a memory like this? Especially when all I have left of it is the faded shadow of your coffee cup circles on my counter?

It's there and gone in a moment. The scent of it hangs in your mind, but it's a quickly fading breeze that will be gone before you know it, leaving you with nothing but a half-eaten plate in a room full of strangers.

..I should really just learn to like eating these things.

[Listening to: Company of Thieves - "Nothing's in the Flowers" ]

Dear Santa

2011-11-28T11:01:00.007-05:00

Hey, how’s it going? I know there’s a long line of kids here so I don’t want to take up a lot of your time. Yeah, we can skip on the sitting on the lap part –- let’s face it, neither of us wants that to happen here, so just huddle up a bit, right? Cool.

Twenty Grand.

You heard me. 20 Gs. I hate to be so blunt and mercenary here – but I don’t really know how else to dress it up. I need 20 grand.

I’m college educated. I work full-time. But I’m sinking. Every month it just gets a little deeper. I don’t so much collect paychecks anymore as much as I’m just sort of stacking sandbags against the tide, and if things keep going the way they have been, there's gonna come a point where even that's not really going to be enough anymore.

Sure, I would like to have all sorts of things for a holiday gift. I would love new guitar stuff or a laptop that doesn’t need rubber bands and string to hold it together. New furniture, hell even the normal crap dads get like socks and gift cards would be nice to have – but it’s way past nice here.

I need 20 grand.

The worst part is that I don’t have any other real way to get it. I don’t have anything I can borrow against. My credit rating is toast. I’m not related to anyone with that kind of juice, and even if I could borrow it I’d sink right back down trying to pay it back.

20 Grand gets this student loan monkey off my back and settles my revolving credit. The income that frees up is the only thing I have that I can use to make this life better, but every month I’m giving it away. I know this is my fault. I’ve made some bad choices and I haven’t always been the best money manager – but how the hell can I get off the ground to fix it if I’m constantly being held underwater?

I don’t have a five year plan. I have a 20 thousand dollar hole. You apparently give people cars wrapped in red bows and toss out diamond rings from Jared and Kay Jewelers to hapless suburban husbands like they’re candy.

You’re good for it, that much is clear.

Well then let’s make a deal. I won’t ask for a Lexus in my driveway and you can just cash me out. And for the next decade or so that you would have gotten me something, we’ll just say I’m covered. I’m willing to forego any number of gift cards to Home Depot for this one. I’ll take that hit.

Oh, I’M being selfish?

Really, Mr. Shows up Before Thanksgiving even happens and demands that everybody I know get up at the crack of 4 the day after Thanksgiving to buy a new refrigerator from Sears?

Seriously, do you know anyone who could actually do that?

You've got a whole culture warped into believing that getting anything on a certain day is proof of solvency. That if we all hustle and fight to get there first then everything is still cool. Well here's the real deal -- lots of us couldn't do it. Lots of us just sat there with our mouths on the floor not only wondering how a population that swears it's utterly broke still managed to show up and spend just for the sport of it -- but where in the hell they actually got the money to do it with!? And even if Black Friday was a huge success this year –- what were people beating each other up over, $2 Waffle Irons?

What am I supposed to do with one of those? Hawk it for 75 cents and send the change to American Express?

Santa, Bubby – I’m your White Knight. Do me this solid and I’ll jump right back on the materialistic train if that’s what you need. But right now I can’t even get into that train station, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone with that.

Anyways, I’ll get out of your hair. Just give it some thought, ok?

[Listening to: Esthero - "Beautiful Lie" ]

Actually Spoken During the Course of My Day

2011-10-21T14:56:00.006-05:00

"That dildo never stayed up all night talking to her on the phone
about nothing until you both drifted off to sleep, and it never will."

[Listening to: The Slants - "Haruki Murakami" ]

High Hopes

2011-05-31T08:54:00.015-05:00

If you could ask an ant one question, what would it be?

In other words, if ants could understand language and talk back, and you could actually get one of them to stop for a moment and do a "man in the street" interview -- what would you want to know?

Because I'll tell you what I'd ask: That space between my pinky toe and the toe next to it -- right there in the middle there, is that the tastiest part (ant-wise) of a human? Or is biting that part of a person's body that some sort of Sanjuro samaurai boss move that is worth risking your entire life for?

Because rest assured -- dude died an instant, crushing death once he bit me on that spot:
But here it is like three days later and my foot still itches like crazy.

Every step I take seems to irritate it -- but even worse, for whatever bizarre reason scratching at the bite is like the best feeling ever.

I don't really have a good way to explain for that, so I'm hoping beyond hope here that people know what I mean here, but like -- it really itches so scratching it takes that sensation away momentarily, which feels like a physical victory of sorts (even though it actually makes the itch come back worse like a second later), but there's also this weird sort of minor pleasure principle in it. Not like a sensual thing, but like that feeling of scratching your back when you first wake up, or finding a way to scratch under the plaster when your arm's in a cast.

Like, it clearly doesn't feel good in and of itself -- but somehow the act of counteracting the itch (or whatever) is such a primal release of endorphins that you'll just push that button again and again like a labrat zapping himself for a piece of cheese.

I don't know -- it's such a minor thing, but at some point early this morning it was like the MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD to scratch that itch, so much so that I rose from what I can only imagine was a really great dream just to deal with it.

I wonder sometimes if things like that are just me.

This idea that the momentary distractions in my life, whether they be food I shouldn't be eating, some blog or article I get pulled into even if I have work to do, or some TV show that doesn't even have to be good, but somehow engages me on some sort of intellectual curiosity level enough to pull me away from anything else that I might have going on at the moment.

There are times when I wish the kinds of things that distract me in this way were a driving motivation to do endless burpees or recycle, but they're usually far less admirable -- like the name of some character actor from the 70's that I couldn't immediately remember (I finally figured out that his name is Alan Weeks), or what it tastes like when you did barbecue potato chips in peanut butter (the answer: not ..terrible).

So much of succeeding at life I think is in the discipline to do the things that not only need to be done on a daily basis, but the ones that break you out of the various ruts you get into -- and that's where I think a lot of us tend to get mixed up.

Paying bills, not losing your job, keeping up with what's going on in your friends lives, making sure your kid is healthy and happy -- these things are important, sure. They take time and effort, but these are not the things that define you. They can easily engulf your life and feel like the disciplines that you have to keep, but in reality that's just existence. We don't hunt or gather anymore -- we grocery shop and help with homework.

Sometimes I think when money's tight and gas is almost five dollars a gallon and every day seems like a rushed effort to get everything in that you said you'd do that really the best part of the weekend is the part when Game of Thrones comes on and you're like "Fuck the Police, let the DVR get it" and fall asleep instead thinking that's some sort of big victory.

I know getting through the week can be hard. Sometimes I'm amazed I can do it at all.

But that's not the game. It's the trap.
Stop scratching the itch.
Stop scratching the itch.
Stop scratching the itch.

[Listening to: Skindred - "Guntalk" ]

Somewhere in America There's a Street Named After My Dad

2011-05-19T11:15:00.027-05:00

Houston. Phoenix. Colorado Springs. Chicago.
That's the list. That's been the list for a while.

Minnesota was on there too for a spell -- and I guess all things considered it's still in play, but ..not like it was before.

The list is the whittled down short list of places I would move to if I could. Places I list on the job hunt sites as "Willing to Relocates." Places that according to my (admittedly lazy) research feature similar costs of living to where I am now. Chicago and Houston more for their outlying suburbs, Csprings because as much as I'd love to -- I apparently couldn't afford any kind of Denver without a considerable salary jump, and I ain't going back to Longmont.

The list used to be longer. Brooklyn was on there, but it was never something I realistically could envision affording. I know losing the car (which would be a weird transition for a Jville native, but would be the inevitability if I were to go there) would help balance the cost, but clearly not enough. Besides, as much as I loved NYC from the moment I first set foot in that town I've always quietly known that it would be a tough place to survive on my own. I've long held ideas about how romantic it would be to bite and scratch every dime to carve out a life in the apple -- but there's child support to be paid, and that has to come first. Maybe my math is pessimistic, but I can't see doing both for very long.

But in that lies the issue.

Any move. Anywhere. Even if it were as close as Orlando (which was on the list for a while) would mean making a decision about my son.

Now here's the thing: I know plenty of people who's fathers weren't there. I know people who never knew their father (I also know plenty of people who wish they'd never known their fathers, but that's another story). I've known people with absent fathers, and I've known a people with actively asshole-ish dads. I know guys who's dad lived in another country.

And all of these people, every one of them turned out FINE.

In most cases better than fine. Hell, it's entirely possible that part of the push that helped drive these people to success has a partial basis in proving those absent fathers wrong. I can't speak to specifics -- because those are their stories not mine, but what I can say with certainty is that every person I know that went through this experience is someone I flat out know I can count on.

But what I don't know -- what I've never met, and frankly hope never to meet is the kind of person who could look their child right in the eye and say, "I'm leaving."

Maybe it's just me, but I can't even conceive of how someone would do that. How they could friggin' live with themselves.

I love my kid. More than anything. But more than that -- I like hanging out with him. We have a good time together. He reminds me of good things in me that I sometimes forget to see when I'm down on myself. He laughs at my jokes, and he cracks me up CONSTANTLY. But above that, the kid's got a good heart -- despite all he's been through with the divorce and all the fallout, his spirit just doesn't break.

Which is why -- regardless of any ambitions, desires, or even any lists I might have researched
or written down -- I sometimes can't really see how I will ever be able to leave this place.

I hate writing that. But if leaving here means leaving him, then I don't know how I'd ever do it. Even if it were close enough that visitiation would only change a little. A lot of this is of course tied up in the ever-shifting politics between me and my ex and the way I handle them, but I'm not going to get into all that here because honestly you don't really want to hear it, but more importantly that's not really what this is all about. It is a prime factor in all of this of course, but I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that even if it weren't -- If the lines were more clear between the two of us and the tensions and issues weren't always getting in the way, and somehow the two of us were at peace -- I'd still have a huge problem moving away from my son.

My dad didn't move. He stayed in town, close enough to be there -- even though it would have been really easy for him to leave. I have no real evidence that he ever considered moving or ever wanted anything other than to be near me and my brother -- but I sometimes wonder why he didn't. Especially later, once we were both doing our own thing and in college.

Part of that I suppose is my Dad's nature. He could have easily gone back to Colorado, or even shifted to Lakeland where his sister lives -- but I'm not sure either one of those were places he was driven to go. Or perhaps better said, I'm pretty sure my father wasn't in any big hurry to move closer to his relatives. Plus, he tends to get set in his routines. Not to speak ill, but my dad can be really passive sometimes.

It's also probably worth mentioning that despite the fact that my father and I are very similar personalities -- he's never exhibited the kind of wanderlust that seems to constantly run through me. I want to go see places. I constatnly feel like there's something more to find, to be a part of.

I fall victim a lot to feeling like I'm missing out on something.

But whether it's a sense of duty, a comfort with where he is, or a fear of the unknown -- my Dad's never been that guy. And even if he actually is that sort of person, he's never really shown it. What I do know, what I've always known -- even longer than I've known that I was adopted -- is that my dad is there.

I want to move. I want to leave. I've lived in Jacksonville, Florida on and off for over 20 years. It's not the worst place in the world, but I've simply been here too long, become too comfortable and accepting of it's limitations and shortcomings. I need a change of scenery. I need a clean slate. And let's face it -- I could probably use the fire in my belly of having to make it somewhere without a net if I ever want to achieve something more than not getting fired from another corporate gig.

I NEED to go.
..But there's no way I'm leaving that kid.

[Listening to: Black Label Society - "SDMH" ]

Being Val Kilmer

2011-05-18T12:01:00.038-05:00

One of my more endearing qualities is my ability to make lists (priority, to-do, laundry, etc.) but then do nothing with them.

But at the same time, I think there's a value in putting stuff down on paper. Sort of placing them in black and white -- especially when you're in the midst of a period where you're feeling stalled.

Anyways, one of the things on my list (of course) is to kickstart this blog back to life at least in some form or another. If you've been keeping tabs -- you know that I've gotten pretty addicted to tumblr, and my site there is doing pretty well (62 followers at last count) -- but as I discussed the last time I was here it's not really much of a place for writing (even though I've tried to inject it here and there when I can).

Here's the thing though -- I've still been writing.

Not tons, but outside of regular album reviews for OHN -- there have been these riffs I've found myself kinda messing with. Ideas that started out as metaphors for something else but then sorta grew out into a completely new idea.

Essentially it's like paint thrown on a canvas that sorta looked like a bunny enough that I started revising and editing to make it look more like a bunny -- only to realize after a while that:

A) It still doesn't really look enough like a bunny for me to feel like it's publishable, and
B) Now that I think about it, this story wasn't supposed to be about bunnies in the first goddamn place, so either I'm going to have to try to somehow loop all of this bunny crap back to the original point, or I just need to trash it altogether.

Here's the thing: Most of what you write is going to be junk. Any literary meta-text will hammer that point at you. To wit: the whole reason you need to write so much is so you can weed through all your mental diarrhea as you move towards the words you're really trying to get out.

Or to put it another way: The revision and editing process in writing is essentially similar to the classical envisioning of sculpture, where you aren't so much carving an image into the stone as much as you're trying to peel away all the outer layers to free the sculpture that already exists inside the rock.

Whether that's true or not is hard to say, because the process is different for every writer and artist out there, but I do think when you're sort of freewriting in an effort to sort of solidify an idea that might not be fully formed in your head yet the metaphor holds up pretty well.

But what all the meta-textbooks about writing never really talk about is that place you sometimes get where you've revised and edited and reworked and chiseled into the rock and when you take a step back to look at it, the idea you finally carved out wasn't really worth a shit in the first place.

Bad ideas happen. Stupid stories exist. It's almost like modern artists (writers and filmmakers especially) put so much emphasis on process that even when a finished work isn't good -- it's still worth putting out as evidence of the work done.

For example -- I see a lot of movies that I feel have some value, but don't work as a whole. I can appreciate them partially and enjoy the experience of watching them -- but as I walk away I there's really no way I can call the whole thing good just because of that concession.

But in an odd way, I sorta do anyways.

I like all sorts of terrible songs because they have great guitar solos. I find myself defending bad movies time and time again because they're "fun" (while turning around and mercilessly hating on other movies that are probably equally good/bad, but don't really fit my particular definition of "fun.")

I don't know -- I'm rambling here, but the point I'm getting towards is that I reach these points periodically where I don't feel like my perceived half-efforts as a writer are worth sharing on this blog just as proof that I'm deeply immersed in some hoidy-toidy "process" (especially if I feel like it's not working).

But I have been writing.

It's just that a lot of what I've been writing lately has been (in my opinion) pretty terrible, and not just because it was overly sappy or high-reaching.

I've still got all of it, as I rarely throw drafts away (thanks Rick Straub) -- but even on re-reading today I'm still at a crossroads as to whether it's something that needs more revising, or if it's just out-and-out junk. And I think in the end that's the issue that leads to these cyclical gaps that show up on this blog a few times a year -- where I start to think of posting on a blog as PROOF THAT I'M A REAL WRITER WORTHY OF ENSHRINEMENT IN THE CANON versus just a place to throw shit up on the web for other people to see and comment on.

Long story short: I'm making too big a deal out of something because it's my something.
And like so many other things going on in my life right now, I kinda just need to get over it and stfu.

Like, I get mad (really mad, actually) when I find out that Rosario Dawson is co-starring in the new Kevin James movie. To me, being in what essentially looks like a Paul Blart Mall Cop sequel is beneath her, and I expect better from what I perceive to be a smart, sexy, and above all independent actress who's had enough success at this point to be in control of her career choices.

So here I am -- not blogging almost as if I were some kind of bizzaro-world Rosario Dawson turning down a part and NOT WORKING because it looks like a stupid fart joke movie made for Middle 'Murica and I believe that I'm capable of better.

And there she is on the screen, actually doing what she loves.

[Listening to: Polkadot Cadaver - "Mongaloid" ]

It's Just a Jump to the Left

2011-03-12T13:40:00.009-05:00

For a while now I've been considering starting a tumblr blog.

If you're not aware, tumblr is a template-based blog system a lot like wordpress or blogger, but with more of a social networking mindset behind it. Blogs can follow other blogs and content can be reposted and shared across the network. It's a much more streamlined design set than blogger, and it was built to better integrate with all the micro-blogging sites out there (twitter, facebook). Essentially it's the newer-model car that gets better mileage and has cooler looking dials on the dashboard.

That being said, from what I've seen it's also mostly picture/video/audio-oriented, which is cool -- but also sort of leans away from the main reason I started making websites like this in the first place, which was to have a place to write.

If you've been here much at all lately you've probably noticed how much I'm not writing, despite getting back to semi-regular posting in the last few months. I go through breaks with it on a regular basis -- but lately it's seemed more than that, much to my concern. I'm still writing here and there when I can, contributing to O Hell Nawl and keeping up on twitter and facebook -- but it's not really the same.

Hence my hesitation with tumblr.

On the one hand, it's time for an upgrade. Despite their best efforts, blogger looks like crap on most smartphones. Comparatively it's clunky and slow to work with. But it is a place to write, and as far as I can tell tumblr isn't.

Not that I'm worried that I'll stop altogether -- but that ease and convenience has shown itself again and again to be a powerful opiate when it comes to online interactions, and despite the belief that I would never be able to, I've discovered that I'm gotten fairly comfortable speaking in 140-character thoughts most of the time.

I don't know -- it's probably a deeper discussion, the difference between having a place to write versus having a place to post and what that means in terms of motivation and follow-thru, and I imagine as I start out on this new page I'll get a better look at that divide face to face and see how I feel about it.

I honestly think I that still have words to share.

But while I'm finding my way through to them, there's a new place I'll be hanging out at. If you're interested, you should come over and have a look:

Always Crashing in the Same Car

[Listening to: Ronny Jordan - "The Jackal" ]

Shine

2011-03-08T12:29:00.009-05:00

Only slightly unrelated: the Esperanza Spalding tickets I couldn't afford when I first heard about the show are totally sold out.

There was a time when I gladly would would have let the electric company shut off my lights before I'd let seats like that go by.

..Growing up sucks.

[Listening to: Van Hunt - "Precious" ]

Witchy Woman

2011-03-03T11:14:00.007-05:00

Maaaan, now I gotta pretend like I enjoy listening to Arcade Fire.

What's that -- You're on a roller derby team? You don't say.

[Listening to: Van Hunt - "Hot Stage Lights" ]

Red Rain

2011-03-02T10:51:00.006-05:00

True Story: When I was a kid growing up in Colorado, I was absolutely TERRIFIED of car washes.

Part of this I think is normal, because when you get right down to it the whole experience is a claustrophobic mess of white noise and huge alien-looking teeth coming right at your window -- but I also can't really discount the fact that I have a distinct memory of watching an old movie with my dad (I want to say it was Bullit, but I could be wrong) where a woman was in a car going through a wash and suddenly a bunch of bad guys basically appeared amongst all the water and brushes..

So believe me when I say that I totally get where Haiku the dog is coming from on this one.

Funny thing though -- as I got older I kinda grew to really dig going through them. In fact, I once dated a girl who kinda had a thing for..
Anyways, I digress.
What kinds of things were you scared of when you were little?

[Listening to: Stateless - "Bloodstream" ]

Life, The Universe, and Everything

2011-02-21T13:00:00.004-05:00

This is pretty much the greatest photograph I've ever seen.

[Listening to: Radiohead - "Separator" ]

Delicious, Delicious Scorpions

2011-02-17T16:50:00.005-05:00

[Listening to: Skrape - "Rake" ]

It's a Small World After All

2011-02-16T16:31:00.008-05:00

Somebody's poisoned the waterhole..

[Listening to: Skindred - "Brainkiller" ]

Perfect Hindquarters

2011-02-15T00:33:00.002-05:00

Hey, hey -- the Westminster Dog Show is going on. And you know what that means:

-- This is also how I usually size up pretty girls in the club after I've had too many.

The way I figure it, someone like this could easily win best in show.

I mean, who else is there -- this guy?

[Listening to: Prime STH - "My Evil Friend" ]

Locals Only

2011-02-14T16:36:00.005-05:00

Not really representative of anything or a comment on the day, just a pic I dig.

[Listening to: Algebra - "What Happened?" ]

Cobra Commander

2011-02-11T10:01:00.007-05:00

The greatest thing you'll see all day -- the infamous Honey Badger video, narrated by his Mother in Law.

-- via Warming Glow.

[Listening to: The Quiett - "Welcome to the Show" ]

I See London I See France

2011-02-01T21:19:00.008-05:00

Just when you think this clip can't get any better, it sooo does.

I'm not saying that a move like this would have saved En Vogue, ..I'm just saying.

[Listening to: Patrick Stump - "Blue Rabbits F*#@ing" ]

Instruct Me How to Douglas

2011-01-31T21:53:00.005-05:00

I think of all the education that I miss, but then my homework was never quite like this..

[Listening to: Skrape - "Kill Control" ]

Power Bottom

2010-11-21T10:12:00.004-05:00

[Listening to: Razed in Black - "Damage Inc." ]

That's My Jam: Bombshock

2010-11-01T08:44:00.014-05:00

I've never really been much of a rave guy.

I was always a little too old for it, to be honest. I like big parties in the middle of nowhere with tons of girls taking the kinds of drugs that promote nakedness just as much as the next guy -- but even with that possible awesome benefit, I rarely if ever could get past the music.

I've written a lot in the past about my varying degrees of tolerance for techno music, including my enjoyment of DnB over other styles in the genre because I always felt it was the closest thing to actual musicians performing rather than a DJ mixing pre-recorded elements together. I appreciate DJ skills, and sometimes honestly wish I knew how to navigate turntables -- but my taste for that kind of music definitely skews more towards the hip-hop side of things.

Simply put -- I'll take five seconds of Terminator X over five minutes of Baby Anne
any day of the week, no matter how tiny her outfit might be while she's on the set.

My main problem with techno and rave DJ music is that they throw too much in. The sound tends to get jumbled with noises and beeps so much that it's hard to enjoy the real essence of what makes it's so infectious and danceable, which is that constant breakbeat underneath it all.

For my taste the whole thing almost always becomes a mess of stop and start button pushing, backwards scratch preset effects and ambulance sirens -- and the more I watch these guys work (Endo remains a sanctuary for the sound, which can sometimes be a good thing when they get a particularly inspired DJ, but is usually just amateur hour on the mixing board) the more I notice that all they really seem to do when they're up on the turntables is start a CD of pre-recorded mashups and then dance around while waiting for the right opportunity to sweep the midrange levels up and down to create flange effects.

To me that's not really creating music -- it's more like constantly screwing with
the car stereo when I'm trying to listen to it, which gets old really, really fast.

I have a number of dear friends who love the music and remain active in the scene -- so I get to hear quite a bit of it when I hit the clubs, and despite all the advances in technology the sound hasn't really changed that much over the years (you might be thinking to yourself, "Rave music? Didn't that die like ..10 years ago?") But if you're willing to dig there are some surprisingly interesting acts to be found out there -- especially coming from the British labels. Which is good, because despite how dated and silly it tends to sound on first glance -- all you really have to do is spend a weekend in Miami to realize that even if the general public wore out on it a decade back, beep-beep-boop music will never, ever go away.

Which is why I'm constantly amused over my love for Hadouken!

I'm pretty sure I first stumbled this Leeds 5-piece outfit with the killer band name on MySpace back in the day when I first heard a track called "That Boy, That Girl" -- it was just one of those songs you come across on someones profile that gets it's hooks into you and won't let go, so much so that you find yourself checking into the bands profile page and downloading anything you could find on it.

The sound comes across much like you'd expect it to at first -- co-opted video game sound effects for beats, repetitive rhythmic figures, and vocals reeking of a British accent -- but the difference here (one that I find pretty significant) is that this is a band. Even with all the post production touches added on, the sound here all comes from the instruments and the players.

It's funny -- the lyrics on their first two albums were all about partying and getting wasted before sneaking into clubs, but the ones on all their new stuff are about picking fights and beating people up.

Not really sure what the deal with all that is -- but I really digging the edge all this aggression is bringing out of them.

I'll never lose my love for my metal and soul records -- but when I get in the mood for this stuff and put it on in the car, it's probably a good idea to make sure your seat belt is securely fastened, because when that beat hits -- things get moving pretty fast.

Take it away, babies.

[Listening to: The Cramps - "I Was a Teenage Werewolf" ]

This Dance Ain't For Everybody, Only The Sexy People

2010-10-27T08:36:00.018-05:00

One of the things you notice about living in this modern age is that while information seems to be everywhere -- not everybody actually uses it. In fact, it could be easily argued that the true power manipulators in our lives these days are the ones who work to shape and color information with their own points of view before disseminating it to the public through various media outlets -- leaving us with just as much opinion as there is fact when we try to learn about things we're not familiar with.

History teaches us that power mongers in the past controlled populations by depriving them of information, even in some cases withholding the ability to get information on their own. Peasants and slaves weren't taught to read, sacred texts were written in Latin dialects only certain people could understand -- information was guarded and hidden.

Our world is different.

Information is everywhere. You literally have to work to avoid it. But in a lot of ways it's as if someone took a bag filled with diamonds, mixed them in with a bunch of cubic zirconias, and then poured them out on a table in front of us. Untold riches are right there in front of us -- but without the ability to tell the difference between the precious and the fake, scores of people are left in the same place as those in the past who couldn't read.

Even worse are those people who have access to information and
possess the knowledge to understand it, but simply refuse to do so.

Growing up the son of a career nurse, I was always astounded by the number of doctors and nurses I encountered who were smokers. Surgeons. Pediatricians. Dentists. People who would literally tell you how deadly it was would then show up at dinner parties or hospital functions and light up. Even at a young age it baffled me, and probably did it's own part in fueling my longstanding distrust of people who tell you how to live your lives with what you should and shouldn't do.

But I think the place where most of us live these days is a weird middleground where we have a basis of knowledge and values that we learned from our upbringing and time in school, mixed with the knowledge that we've acquired along the way to survive in our daily lives and situations.

For example, for a while now I've been struggling with my weight. I'm not in the kind of shape I'd like to be in, and I could really stand to lose some pounds. I happen to know beyond a shadow of a doubt what I need to do to fix it -- the answer is always the same: Burn more calories than you take in.

The math is easy. But getting it into practice is where things get tricky.

One of the things that's always been sort of a pain in doing this math is the whole "How Many Calories am I taking in?" part of the equation. First of all, it's hard to get straight numbers -- especially if you live a hectic lifestyle and frequently eat on the run. Even when I have an idea of what I'm eating and what's in it -- it's hard to get a specific reading of how sauces, spices, or even how you cook something might come into play.

The other thing about it is that even when you do have the knowledge available -- how do you track it?

Calorie counting websites have been around for a while. The electronic outgrowth of the old "food diary" ideas. In theory it's an awesome idea -- just put in the foods you eat, let the website do the math, and then adjust your intake based off the data it puts back out at you. The problem has always been that depending on what kinds of food you eat -- sometimes you're left "creating" entries in the database. Sometimes this is easy -- foods you cook have all info written on the label.

But then you hit a restaurant, or a drive-thru, or a truck stop vending machine..

Plus (and this is really the worst part) is that once you get in the habit of writing all this down, it's sometimes a hard mirror to look at. And if your issue going into the process is the basic lack of self-discipline not to eat crappy food (or counter it with the appropriate amount of exercise) -- that your food diary becomes sort of a boogeyman. The food diary doesn't know that you had a hard day, or that you were on the road all night and just needed some sugar to keep awake for those last 100 miles -- it just sits there judging you like Tony Dungy.

So you cheat it. You don't enter certain things, or you fudge the
serving sizes. Or worse, you just sort of give up on it all together.

The other thing that makes it a hassle is portability. Lives are busy, so it's not always convenient to pull up a website after every meal -- leading you to this place where at the end of a day (or worse, the next day) you're trying to remember what you ate, fill in the blanks so to speak.

It's still really about self-discipline (as always) -- but having quicker access would certainly help.

Which is why I found myself intrigued when a my boy Satorical suggested a new site called Loseit.com. Essentially a calorie database tracker, it also offers active forums full of people offering encouragement, recipe suggestions, and constructive ideas of how to get back on track when things go south.

The best part, James said was that it's all integrated with an iPhone app. When he eats or exercises -- he just updates the app and then gets on with his day. Simple, easy, and clean.

Of course (as I'm sure you all read in yesterday's post) I'm a Droid guy -- but most things that are on iPhone these days have a corresponding Android equivalent, so it was just a matter of finding it and installing it on my phone.

A quick check of the Android market turned up a Loseit app, which I quickly downloaded and installed. The icon on the app itself looked a little different from the website's -- but that's not really that unusual with droid apps, so I didn't think much of it.

But then when I activated the thing -- what I found was a lot different than
what I imagine the LoseIt.com would like to have attached to their name:

[Listening to: Killing Joke - "Change" ]

Vyvyan

2010-10-26T07:35:00.027-05:00

Ok before I get to this, let me just say that even though I've had my issues with it and gone through 4 replacements since starting out with them, that in general I like the Droid. It's a pretty solid phone, does a ton of cool stuff, and essentially lets me run my life out of one box. There are features here and there that could work better and it's not as slick as an iPhone -- but it works for me to the point where I've all but handed all of my communication, calendaring, and quick social networking duties over to it.

In fact when you get right down to it -- the real problem with the droid is it presents itself as a "do everything" sort of gizmo, which frequently leads you to think it actually can. So you load it up with apps, each that are supposed to integrate with each other and share data and get along like good little skynet systems -- only to find that (surprise, surprise) there are limits to what the processor can handle at one time.

At the same time, despite being a pretty cool gizmo -- it happens to be tied to a cell phone company that while still preferable to AT&T (never, ever again with those fucks) still tends to be an utter pain in the ass to deal with whenever you actually need help with something that doesn't work the way it's supposed to.

Case in point. The Droid says that it can be used as a wifi hotspot or a tethered modem. In other words, you can plug this into your laptop and share it's network access. There's even a button in the settings that turns this feature on and off.

The other day -- tired of the games the new IT regime at my job is continuing to play blocking music sites that were previously available like Pandora and Last.fm, I decided to go around them by bringing the lapper in with me and just run it through the phone. I had the cables, it says it could do the trick -- seemed like a nice little plan.

Except that I couldn't get it to work.

I'm no tech genius, but I also know that I'm capable of making most things work that are designed to set up a certain way. I had it plugged in right, it just wouldn't ..go. I tried a few variations, but couldn’t find the trick -- so I finally threw my hands up and called customer service for an assist.

And not for nothing -- But I always like it when you call people on the phone and can clearly tell that they're reading answers to you. That instills tons of confidence.

Anyways, I explain my situation, and the gal on the line says that my phone cant do that. To which I reply that I actually think it can. She insists no, I tell her that I'm looking at the switch that makes it do that -- and we argue a little more about it until she finally sort of relents and moves on to her next point -- which is that if I want to tether my computer it costs like $20-$30 more a month for data sharing. When I tell her my plan offers unlimited data sharing, she informs me that this is "different" data sharing.

Then just as I'm about to inform her of all the ways her last statement doesn't make any sense whatsoever when she breaks into my line of speech and says "I found it! -- It says here is that only the Droid 2 can tether data."

Oh boy, Here we go.

I don't want to buy a new phone, I tell her (sensing a sales pitch racing in) -- but she insists that my warranty agreement enables me one as a free replacement.

This also makes no sense, but I sort of let her run with it because hey -- free phone, right?

So that's in the mail apparently, but it doesn’t solve my real issue -- which is making my current phone do something it's already claiming to be able to do. We go round and round on this for a while with no result, essentially with me telling her that I would wait until I saw the new phone to decide on the different data plan.

After the call ended, I sat there in front of my computer and phone -- music-less, sort of frustrated, and decided to give it another go. I tried some tech blogs, googled some different things, and came up with an app that said it could do what I wanted -- so what the hell.

Install, transfer, plug in.. Bingo.

High speed free of charge Internet right from my phone directly onto my laptop. Tunes ahoy. Blocked sites available. No extra data plan, no nothing. Just plug and play -- Droid does, and away we go.

The new phone arrives tomorrow. No idea what I'm gonna do with that thing now.

Anyways -- for all around lack of helpfulness and then giving away a product that I don't need for free just to shut me up, I'm awarding this Vyvyan to my cell phone provider, Verizon Wireless.

ps -- That thing you said my phone couldn't do? It's doing it now.

[Listening to: Caro Emerald - "Back It Up" ]

I Like My Women Crazy

2010-10-25T07:24:00.003-05:00

..Anyone who knows me will tell you that. But there is a limit:

I don't care how fine you are -- there's no way you'll ever get me to wear a Snuggie.

[Listening to: Polkadot Cadaver - "Long Strange Trip to Paradise" ]

Sharif Don't Like It

2010-10-20T07:40:00.009-05:00

[Listening to: Polkadot Cadaver - "Purgatory Dance Party" ]

Actually Spoken During the Course of My Day

2010-10-19T23:03:00.005-05:00

"Girl you gonna think I invented socks."

[Listening to: Lovage - "To Catch a Theif" ]

Sometimes I Fall I Slip

2010-10-18T07:03:00.010-05:00

A small child in a room full of toys. One of those garage playsets with two levels, the bottom a dashed-line road painted alongside painted green grass, treetops looking down, and smiling painted animals looking up. The top level the garage where the matchbox and the hot wheels wait for the fingers to push them along.

The best part about this toy was that if you turned the little crank on top of the parking garage the little road on the bottom level would move like a little conveyor belt. Around and around the supports of the top level the road would go, coming around the corner, going through the tunnel, and if you wanted -- onto a curving ramp with little hooks that would hold the toy cars in place as it pulled them to the second level.

I don't know why, but I loved this toy.

It wasn't even mine -- but it was at a daycare center I spent many an afternoon at after school while my brother and I waited for my parents to get off work and pick us up. This was in the days before we were old enough to latch-key, back when we went daycare to daycare trying to find a place that my parents could afford that wasn't so low budget that they didn't feel weird about leaving us there for hours at a time.

What I would do -- I don't even know why I'm telling you this, or why the memory came shooting back to me this morning bright as a sunbeam through a raincloud -- what I would do is steal this toy away, and get under a table in the playroom. The table had a cloth over it, so the light underneath was low. Not dark like night, but enough that the shadows would stretch depending on where you watched them from.

I'd take Matchbox cars I'd hidden in my bookbag and held onto all day at school, and I'd put them on the lower road, randomly spaced. They'd sit there still, staggered in a traffic jam still life. Backlit like characters in some noir film. And then I'd lay on the ground, eye level with the pretend road, and I would turn the crank on top.

And the cars would just go round and round, and their shadows would
grow, stretch, and fade as the toys rounded the corner and disappeared.

They would come back again in a few turns, but as I remember it the point wasn't about seeing them come back as much as it was about feeling them move. About seeing it with your eyes, but somehow feeling it deep inside -- that Doppler shift where the motion was evident, the reality seemed to lean, and the things that were once stuck in place were able to find their momentum and move forward -- on with their busy lives with places to go and things to take care of.

I would watch this for what seemed endless loops of time. Sometimes I would invent stories to go along with it. A cop chasing a bad guy, something I'd seen on TV.

But more often than not it was me in that car.

Not a little kid anymore, not held back by a road that never seemed to move without hands from above -- but riding fast and free through the night, the shadows of my car stretching and fading along the walls of some far off freeway tunnel.

To be in one place forever dreaming of being in another is natural. But to stay in one place imagining it happening while you have the power to just get up and make it happen is a transition I think some of us don't always have the easiest time with.

I have the power to make the shadows move. I can drive a thousand miles without ever touching the road.
But when the lights go up and the wheel stops turning. When you realize you've
imagined a million journeys but never actually moved from where you started..

[Listening to: Kings of Leon - "Radioactive" ]

She Said She Loved the Smell of Old Books

2010-10-17T23:52:00.006-05:00

And really.. who could argue with that?

[Listening to: Namie Amuro - "Handle Me" ]

Feel The Corporate Love

2010-09-07T08:26:00.006-05:00

Finally got my new desk (my request to the IT department to move my computer and phone sat in limbo for months, so Friday afternoon I just decided to move it all myself and do the re-connections manually, which was surprisingly easier than our IT crew would have you believe) so now that I'm here -- all that's left is to get a new name tag on the wall and get a new mailbox so all my correspondence can find me in the new spot.

Put in the request with my new manager this morning -- and to my surprise it's already done:

Damn, it feels good to be a Gingsta.

[Listening to: Jemapur - "Maledict Car" ]

Birth School Work Death

2010-08-30T09:58:00.005-05:00

Is this really all there is?

[Listening to: Peeping Tom - "Caipirinha" ]

Monologuing

2010-08-10T08:10:00.005-05:00

Do you know where your Super Suit is?

[Listening to: Lamb of God - "Walk With Me in Hell" ]

I'm Supposed to Believe This Guy Lost a Card Game?

2010-08-09T08:18:00.002-05:00

[Listening to: Flyleaf - "Fully Alive" ]

The Friday Hot Sheet

2010-07-30T08:45:00.053-05:00

Man, four days without a cell phone will mess your world up.

I don't know -- maybe it's a sign that I'm really far too connected to all this social media/internet stuff -- but not having access to the world that I was used to for a few days was a real eye opener. I mean, I was able to get by and survive, but the simple fact was that I'd become so tethered to that technology that I didn't even have another phone in the house to fall back on should something have happened.

And yet, it's interesting to think how easy it was for me to get into that bind.

Whether it was for financial reasons, convenience, or both -- having just one phone that could do just about everything I needed seemed like a cool idea until that one phone went on the fritz and suddenly I had NOTHING.

And yet, was it really any different back in the day when I had one crappy AT&T slimline tethered to the wall?

You know the one -- with that super long extension cord you bought at the drug store attached so you could walk around your apartment like a pimp while you held the cradle in one hand while you held the receiver between your cheek and shoulder, talking whatever game you could while absently pacing back and forth as far as your own little personalized phone cord leash would let you go?

I know I'm not the only one who eventually ended up with the broken little plastic thingy on the connector -- which meant that sometimes when you took one step too far or maybe turned your head suddenly you'd end up killing the call (usually at the exact moment when you didn't need the line to go dead)?

Nothing like aimlessly twisting your finger in a cord while talking away only to suddenly realize that you've both disconnected yourself and blocked the other person from calling you back all in one move.

Dropped calls or spotty 3G coverage is annoying, but when you get right down to it is nothing compared to the hell of waiting for your pulse tone phone to cycle through all the 8's and 9's in some girls phone number while you tried to get her back on the line before someone else at her house tied up the line and the moment slipped away.

So before I dial zero and have the operator break into the line -- here are this week's risers and fallers, and the buzz as it looks from here:

Oversaturation I sorta lost count after a while there -- but something like 50 more tapes of Mel Gibson screaming obscenities on the phone were released last week, the difference being that this time around nobody really gave a shit. Which is kind of weird, considering how hilarious this whole situation was the first time we heard about it. It's almost as if everybody sort of had an unconscious limit for the number of times we could hear Mel yell out the c-word, and he crossed it somewhere around the fifth phone call.

Little did we know there were like 10 more of the things, and that Radar Online would do everything they could to make sure we had access to them all.

It's one of the strange things about our voyeuristic society. We have an appetite for seeing people fall from their pedestals, especially when they reveal themselves to be something different from what we perhaps thought they were. And yet the one thing people grow weary of in a hurry is when two self-absorbed people feel the need to bicker in public. Which is not to say that Mel Gibson isn't some unbalanced racist nutjob, but this has been going on long enough for folks to realize that his Russian girlfriend spent like 2 months recording their conversations (which suggests that even if she were the victim of his temper -- that she in turn put extra effort into guiding conversations towards things she knew would just set his crazy ass off, and then conveniently hushing up so the microphone would pick up his rantings loud and clear).

Now don't get it twisted -- I'm not trying to shift the blame or put the victim on trial here, but once something like this stretches into two weeks I'm sure I'm not the only one who suddenly felt like an involuntary marriage counselor who was stuck having to hear all of this played out in front of them. Plus, after the first round of games I think we all started to suspect what we had here were two people who like to argue, people who want the drama. At which point I think the majority of us just sorta backed out of the room, closed the door, and got on with our lives while those two peacocks continue to peck it out amongst themselves.

Futurama Netflix has several seasons of Futurama available for instant play, and after a long time of not seeing the show I decided to queue up an episode the other day while I was watching my son play video games. What started out as an attempt at interesting background noise turned into a full night of him and I catching up on a show we occasionally watched before bedtime when he was younger.

I like The Simpsons, but was never really addicted to it the way a lot of other people I know were. As such, I initially didn't gravitate towards Futurama when it was on FOX. Then I discovered it on Adult Swim a few years later and fell utterly in love with the show. But as they frequently do, Adult Swim sorta ran Futurama into the ground with marathons and repeated episodes night after night. Still funny, but too much of the same thing over and over, you know?

The new episodes on Comedy Central have been fun -- but what's been really neat for me is revisiting those old episodes now that my son is old enough to start getting more of the jokes. He's only 10, so a good bunch of it still flies over his head -- but we've really been getting into the slapstick parts together, which has led to a bunch of great father/son evenings recently.

So many of the shows he likes (Ben 10, Bakugan, Flapjack, etc.) do nothing for me at all, and a huge majority of the things I like are things he really doesn't need to be seeing yet -- so it's nice to find something that offers us both a middleground.

Obama on
The View Back in my time of being unemployed, daytime TV was an easy narcotic to fall prey to. Even when I was hyper-vigilant about submitting applications and resumes to places, it wasn't like I could force the phone to ring -- so there were lots of days where I would veg out at home catching up on old reruns, Sportscenter, or trashy talk shows.

And yet, one thing I could never really get with was The View. I know it's aimed at a different audience and gender than I fit into -- but the few times I've seen it flipping channels it was really hard to see how that show ever became a hit.

Seriously, everybody on there talks over everyone else. Not to mention the fact that it's frequently confusing as to what the hell they're even talking about in the first place. But worst of all, they never really seem to settle any of their own arguments. Who knows, maybe that's the point -- but any time I tried to check it out it gave me a headache just listening to those hens cluck at each other.

As such, it was a little weird to hear that Obama was going on there -- and yet it was clearly a platform where he could reach out to a demographic that was a huge help to him during the election years and address a variety topics in a forum where for the most part he couldn't get too grilled. Not that they didn't try to ask him tough questions -- but that the format and time restrictions played in his favor a lot more than say a press conference or some open town hall meeting in the middle of nowhere filled with prospective Joe the Plumber's lying in wait.

Unfortunately, the whole thing ended up being more of a media circus than anything else -- which John Stewart was quick to point out on The Daily Show later that night:
Look, I realize that the man's not quite conquered all the dragons yet. And a lot of that is on him, his administration, and the way they choose to handle things. But I like that he's willing to get into forums like this and take the shots (such as they are). Of course he's still a politician -- so you have to take his answers with a certain grain of salt, but it's good to see him in a situation where he can feel somewhat at ease and still be faced with questions and concerns.

Jersey
Shore
Season 2 If you're looking for someone to at least partially blame for the return of these overhyped Bennies, feel free to get mad at me. Even though I was fully aware of how ridiculous the whole thing was I watched anyway, enjoying the human train wreck for what it was -- especially considering that the first time it appeared was in the dead of a particularly long winter (even in Florida) -- which had the strange side effect of making coastal New Jersey seem like some tropical paradise by comparison.

All of which makes me wonder how well Jersey Shore will fare this second time around -- especially given that most of the country is in now the throes of a brutally hot summer, meaning the on-screen antics won't have the benefit of seeming like somewhere we'd all like to be instead of shivering in the cold.

This time around they're not even in New Jersey, but in South Beach Miami (Jersey was snowed under when the series was shot), which means the clubs they visit will be swankier, the a-holes and grenades around them more pretentious -- in short, it will be less of a show about morons bumbling though a boardwalk summer and more about quasi-celebrities partying in the playground of the rich and well-to-do.

I'm still interested in this new season (it premiered last night but I haven't had a chance to watch my DVR recording of it) -- but a big part of the appeal the first time around was these vapid kids acting like the various spots they hit on the shore were the greatest places ever, only to have the camera zoom out to catch a scene wider than just the fist pumping guidos to reveal that the "exclusive club" they were all at was just some lazy boardwalk watering hole filled with half-asleep old guys and the kind of dudes who would punch a Snooki on cue.

Anyone who's ever spent time at Panama City Beach or Daytona's old boardwalk before they cleaned it up knows exactly what I'm talking about here -- because that's really what the Jersey Shore is. The rich kids go to the Hamptons, and the rest of us get the crappy putt-putt course next to the T-Shirt shop.

So those of you who are sick of Snooki, Paulie D, The Situation, and the rest shouldn't worry too much, because MTV (as usual) is messing with the formula, which rarely ends well. Lets just hope for the sake of entertainment that it goes out in a flaming spray-tanned ball of fury.

Jane
Austen’s
Fight Club Look, I want to like this video clip. I love Fight Club. I love old-school literary humor. I also really, really love it when hot chicks beat the crap out of one another. So on all those fronts, this clip wins with flying colors.
But there’s a problem.
See, there are just some things in this world that transcend basic comedy. That rise above all premise, character, and metaphor. Maybe it’s just me -- but when you ask someone to buy into something like this, it’s imperative that I believe it all the way through. That nothing comes between me and that fourth wall that would interrupt my suspension of disbelief to the point where I have trouble remembering what the original joke was supposed to be.
And if there’s one thing in this world that I understand -- one rule that I absolutely know to be true:
It’s that the white girl dance ruins everything.

Seriously, ladies. I was 100% with you until around the 2:25 mark.

[Listening to: 88-Keys - "Close Call (Feat. Phonte)" ]

A Dude Playing a Dude Disguised as Another Dude

2010-07-29T23:34:00.010-05:00

Remember that blog post I wrote about a week back where I was telling you how I was worried that my dog might believe he's a cat on account of me discovering that he had somehow managed to poop in the litterbox?

Well apparently that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Seriously, new shit has come to light:

One minute I'm trying to figure out why the puppy only wants to eat the cat food and the next I find the cat sleeping in the kennel.

I mean really, what's next?

[Listening to: Sting - "Consider Me Gone" ]

That's My Jam: Squeee

2010-07-28T09:16:00.039-05:00

I'll probably catch a bunch of crap for this, but I've always loved this song -- so anyone who's got a problem with it can go screw.

Even more embarrassing than admitting I actually like a mall metal song is the fact that while I do enjoy the guitars and the arrangements -- what really draws me back to this song time and time again are the vocals. Straight up -- I love singing along with this. I mean, I'm not really that great a singer at all -- but that rarely ever stops me from trying my best to keep up with this track in the car, the shower, or wherever this might come up on the iPod.

Actual results may vary.

But the absolute weirdest fact about my love for this song is that I probably never should have even heard of it in the first place.

Had I never landed a job as a middle school teacher at the exact time frame that I
did the chances of me ever coming across this song would probably have been zero.

But I did take that job, which led to a string of years where I spent the better part of my days hanging out with rooms full of 14 year-olds.

I liked the kids. Despite all the yelling I did (and I did quite a bit of that), my students and I actually got along pretty good. A big part of that was me just being my stupid big kid self -- but I also think that a lot of it can be contributed to the fact that I liked to try and use music as a bridge.

For example I used to do this thing where I would randomly pick a kid to be the DJ. The DJ could bring in any 3 songs he wanted to play. The other kids would listen to those songs and then do a timed writing on the music they heard with prompts like "Which one of these three songs would you rather be stuck in an elevator listening to, and why?" -- which in my mind felt like an interesting way to practice for the FCAT.

But beyond that -- one of the things I noticed early on in my teaching career was the way that the different cliques of kids tended to separate. I mean, I know that's what cliques are supposed to do, -- but I always felt like it got in the way of open discussions in class. So I tried to do what I could to break down those lines, even if it was just during class time in my room.

Most of the time the kids who were into hip-hop would turn their nose at the songs the rocker kids chose (and vice versa) -- but every now and then you'd catch a kid opening his ears to something new.

Unfortunately, what it meant for me was that I had to endure a ton of really shitty death metal and cheesy hip hop while I tried to get these kids to walk a mile in each others' shoes. Between the emo kids with their H.I.M. and Evanescence and the rap fans with their Master P and Lil Jon it felt like the price for this particular détente might be my own sanity.

There was even this one kid who brought in this rap country song that might just be the corniest thing I've ever heard in my life -- which was bad enough, but then I couldn't get the friggin chorus out of my head for like three days afterward.

And now neither can you. You're welcome.

Anyways, the point of all this is that one of the bands that got played to death when I did this thing was My Chemical Romance, who at the time were the darlings de jour of the Hot Topic set. Most of what I heard from them drove me up the wall -- mainly because (in an odd twist, considering the reasons I like "The Ghost of You") I really couldn't stand singer Gerard Way's caterwauling vocals and a what felt like an overabundance of frenetic pop punk behind him.

The music was loud and brash -- but instead of focusing that energy towards a destination, My Chemical Romance songs always seemed to just run around in circles like a kid who'd had too much sugar and couldn't handle the high.

Later albums had them becoming more theatrical and ostentatious -- almost as if they bought into their own fame and supposed importance, and much like latter-era Marylin Manson got caught up in their own cult of personality, culminating in the rock-opera-ish mess that made up the majority of The Black Parade. I tried to listen to it a few times at the urging of former students (not to mention multiple endorsements from Chez at Deus ex Malcontent) -- but as soon as I came across the track where the singer does a duet with (I'm not making this up) Liza Minelli, I was pretty much done with them.

It's weird, because being the old guy in the classroom back when I was a teacher -- it was painfully obvious to me that despite a staggering number of my femalestudents drawing the band's logos all over their textbooks and claiming their ever-lasting love for various members of the band all the goddamn time that My Chemical Romance were doomed to be just another flash in the pan just like so many other bands that girls had gotten all ootzy over back when I was in school.

And yet here was a song by them that I genuinely liked.
And it wasn't the only one, either.

Every year a new crop of teenagers finds some new band, rapper, or artist tho go utterly crazy for -- and then forget a few years later. From Menudo to Duran Duran (although to be fair, those dudes can actually play) -- pretty boys with guitars run the dangerous risk of becoming big stars for the most superficial of reasons, leaving them little to stand on once puberty hits and their core group fans move onto something else. Most of the time (at least in my mind) it's a good thing, because it provides most of pop music's most annoying personalities with relatively short half-lives.

But every now and then I find myself wondering if this continual building up and tearing down of the flavor of the month might occasionally be robbing us of a choice few bands or artists that might actually be a lot better than the screaming teenage fangirl hype that they were built around.

I can't be the only one who's ever run into this problem. Have there ever been any bands that you really liked as a kid because they were wildly popular or just filled with really good-looking pin-up model types who actually had good songs to offer? Maybe a group that you first found as a teeny bopper but still find yourself listening to now?

And if so, who were they?

[Listening to: Black Sheep - "Similak Child" ]

Everybody Relax, I'm Here

2010-07-27T10:07:00.001-05:00

Goat butts against the hedge and horns become entangled, bitches.

[Listening to: Sevendust - "Forever Dead" ]

The Ghost of Greg

2010-07-26T08:17:00.018-05:00

So I finally got my marching orders telling me it's time to move to my new cube, where my new manager (the one who gets all bent out of shape about my dress code violations) can keep a better eye on me. Not that he's actually come out and said that's what he's doing -- but the way things have been going lately it seems like the only really logical explanation.

To be honest, the whole thing has been an annoying drama. Currently I sit with document control -- a department that I don't work for, but the one that's actually the closest related to my job. Anyways, the guy who runs that department is one of these passive-aggressive types who clearly has issues with some of my quirks, but really doesn't have any sort of direct authority to do anything about it -- a problem he compensates for by quietly doing all these little backhanded things to sort of kneecap me.

Like -- one day I could use the network color printer in the room, and the next my access was blocked by an "administrator."

This is the same guy who ratted me out to my old manager for drinking coffee at my desk instead of asking me not to do it (my old manager rolled his eyes when he told me about this, and went on to tell me that dude's always been like this).

But by far his master stroke has been this whole cubicle move thing.

Basically the company is remodeling our offices bit by bit. As part of this remodeling, the people I currently sit with are moving to a different location with customized offices and updated equipment. I found this out because passive-aggressive guy was boasting about it all in a conversation he started with me one day.

Then 10 minutes later I went to a meeting with my new manager, who
informed me that I wasn't included in the doc control department move.

Anyways, eventually they found an open spot for me -- one that was formerly inhabited by a guy in finance named Greg. Our job functions rarely cross paths, but on the few occasions I've worked with Greg I've always found him to be a good dude. Apparently he's moving up the ladder a bit (kudos) so his old cube opened up.

On the good side, I'll be getting 3 1/2 walls (which is a step up from the shared table/desk thing I'm sitting at now) -- but I'm also now in my new manager's line of sight, and even though I'm moving to a new spot I STILL can't have coffee at my desk, which is just criminal.

All that being said, it's just a desk, and despite my occasional whining this is a pretty good gig, and one I'm not in a hurry to lose -- especially when you consider just how crappy the job market is out there, so even if some of the details of this move kinda stink -- so in the end my mission really is to just suck it up and roll with the changes, you know?

Or at least I thought that was my mission. Because the other day when I went over to my future new desk to see how much space I was getting --

This is what I found:
OK, new mission -- Where the hell's the rest of Greg!?
And who do I talk to around here about getting a cubicle with no monsters hiding underneath it?

[Listening to: OutKast - "I'll Call Before I Come" ]

Adorable Little Angel

2010-07-25T07:14:00.010-05:00

So, how did the kid sleepover go?

Not too bad. The kids got along, fun was had, nobody died or lost any limbs. Braden (the visiting kid) actually asked his parents if he could for stay another night -- which was either a sign of how well things were going, or just his way of pre-planning as there were still a few things in the apartment that he hadn't had a chance to mess with yet.

At one point the kids were sufficiently involved with videogames and snacks and stuff that I went to check my text messages only to discover that my phone was messing up. "Messing up" being code for not working at all. I'd been having some issues with my Droid lately, so I just assumed it needed a reboot to fix the problem.

It didn't.

And thus began the unexpected crisis of the day -- as it became immediately clear that the phone was on, but the display was dead, rendering the phone pretty much useless.

Add to this some weirdness in my contract which enabled me to get a replacement, but only from the factory and only three days from now. And while I suppose the fact that I don't have to fork out a couple of hundred dollars for a new one (my only other option, according to Verizon) is a good thing, am I the only one out there who suspects that most cell phone providers just make up their various rules and restrictions as they go along?

Either way, I'm smartphone-less for a few days -- which has provided me with the horrible realization of just how tethered to that thing I've become. In addition to not having a working phone, I'm also without my de facto watch, my mobile access to the web and various internet-based distractions, my text communications device -- all that stuff.

Kinda sad to realize just how addicted the world has become to these things.

I also have a bunch of apps/games on there for my son to play with (which he had been proudly showing off to his sleepover buddy earlier in the evening) -- which he asked to play with this morning and I had to remind him that he couldn't since the phone had stopped working.

At which point he kinda nodded in remembrance and said,
"Oh yeah, that happened after Braden dropped it."

[Listening to: Skindred - "You Can't Stop It" ]

The Friday Hot Sheet

2010-07-23T08:28:00.045-05:00

Damn, it’s hot out. Winter cold isn’t much fun to start with, but if I had to trade one climactic condition away, it would be these endless waves of thick, sticky hot that just won’t go away during the late summer months. For the record, I like sunshine. I love warmth. But this is something else entirely.

This heat just sorta sits on you – embalming you in its dryness without relief.

Living in Florida certainly doesn’t help -- but at least there’s a beach and plenty of pools nearby.

One of the reasons I like apartment living is the amenities -- but there’s something about my current complex that’s a little weird when it comes to chlorinated swimming, or to be more precise -- the company you'll find yourself in once you decide to hit the pool.

I mean yeah, any time there’s a pool that’s generally accessible – you’re gonna have to deal with screaming kids, overbearing parents, and the nagging worry that you're swimming at least partially in someone else's pee. That’s just part of the deal.

But what I’m finding more and more bothersome when I go for swims or take my kid to go play in the water are the supposedly upwardly mobile types.

There’s this one couple in particular who show up to the pool on a semi-regular basis who bring a permanent stinkface with them. Neither of them say much, but their condescending looks and the continual fuss they make over this sorta iPod dock/radio thing they always bring with him to blast Norah Jones (btw, who asked you to supply music in the first place?) just makes me want to pay every kid I can find to do 1000 cannonballs just so we can short the thing out.

Last time I checked we all pay the same landlord rent, so don't
act all huffy that someone else is soaking up your sunshine, k?

It’s one thing for Jethro and Bertha to buy thong bathing suits for each and every one of their fat little children before they come to the pool. But it’s quite another to come to an apartment pool with a look that clearly betrays the fact that you believe it should be your own private playground.

So before I "accidentally" let the dog pee all over their towels -- here are this week’s risers and fallers, and the buzz as it looks from here:

The San Diego Comic Con   Sometimes the Internet offers people a chance to connect to events and other people thousands of miles away, whether it's through social networking sites or mutual interest in a viral video or whatever. But sometimes the web focuses on things you're not at. Things you can't share.

Every year in San Diego there's a comic book convention. Its more than just comics of course, but once upon a time it was sort of a closely guarded secret spot for nerds, anime fans, and movie geeks. Then it sort of became a cool thing for celebs to crash, and now it's just become a self-congratulatory Hollywood wank fest. But more than that -- it's a magnet for bloggers of almost all varieties to go and either celebrate their fandom or make fun of the people there.
And boy do they rub it in.
People I know who've gone before rave about it, but they also do that "it used to be cool, but then it sold out. I shan't be returning." And while I'm sure they're right (these are trusted friends, after all) it doesn't diminish the fact that I really wanted to go. I thought about it for many years (Gristina lives there and used to go annually) but I simply couldn't afford the trip. I'd still like to go to it at some point -- not because it seems like everyone else is there and I'm worried I'm missing out on something, but because it looks like a really great time for an anime/comic book/film geek like me.

It's just sort of weird the way almost all the blogs and news sites I frequent are reporting from the con this week. So literally all my regular news and stuff is being filtered through updates about girls in Slave Leia costumes and news about Joss Whedon directing the new Avengers movie. "Nyah, Nyah -- I stood in line for two hours to see a table filled with people who worked on Lost, what did you do today?"
I read about you doing it, thanks.

Inception I know I've already gushed about this on Twitter and to anyone willing (or unwilling) to listen to me rave on about it for the last week or so -- but it really is an entertaining movie. Not only for the interesting storyline and all the special effects, but for the thoughts it provokes and the conversations it leads to after you see it. Sometimes the best part of watching a movie (or enjoying any form of art, for that matter) is letting it sink in and considering it afterward.

As such, I've been really happy about the way Inception has sat in my mind this past week, letting me consider ideas and sort of work through some of the things the film leaves open to interpretation. It's sorta like a Rubik's cube that you can pick up and play with now and again.

But let me ask this of the people who have already seen it. How are you sleeping? I'm finding that although I haven't had any really wacky dreams (that I can recall) since watching the movie, I'm sorta hyper-aware of waking up lately. Like I'll open my eyes and sit up, but then I'm taking more stock of my surroundings than I usually do. Kinda like the way I didn't like showers after seeing Psycho or hated answering the phone after The Ring. I haven't invested in a totem just yet, but it's sorta weird that I keep waking up wondering which level I'm on.

Sleepovers   This weekend (tonight, in fact) my son will be hosting his first sleepover with one of his friends from daycare -- which really means that I will be hosting my first kid that's not mine sleeping in my apartment tonight. Curren's super jacked up about it, and it should be a good time, but if this kid is anything like my son is -- I've got some serious house cleaning to do. A few months ago he stayed over at another kids house, and the next day my son basically ratted out every detail of their place to me.

10 year-olds don't really get the concept of discretion, so it's not like it's mean-spirited -- but I distinctly remember listening to him telling me how messy their bathroom was and instantly realizing that if we ever had this kid over to my place the same thing was going to happen to me.

I'm a single guy living alone with a fast Internet connection. There's a high amount of ~~porn~~ stuff in this place that I'm pretty sure this kid's parent's don't want to know about. I can just see Curren coming back from daycare next week telling me that he can't play with his friend anymore. Talk about embarrassing.

Salt I know Angelina Jolie's a mega-star and all and her name is usually enough of a draw to get people in the door, but does anyone else find it weird how sort of quietly this movies marketing has been? I mean, I've seen trailers and I've heard about it -- but unlike a lot of other films this summer, I don't feel particularly bashed over the head with hype about Salt, and it makes me wonder why?

Apparently the movie was originally a vehicle for Tom Cruise -- who's movie choices lately make Mel Gibson seem rational (did you hear they're building an entire movie around the agent character he played in Tropic Thunder, the same guy he trotted out at the MTV movie awards? Hey Tom, it was a funny character -- but maybe ask Paul Reubens how much fun it is to be stuck in a franchise that's been built around one joke, eh?). I don't really know why Cruise backed out of it, but for them to re-write the thing around Jolie seems pretty intriguing. She's good at stunt driven movies, she's actually a half-decent actress, and still even after all the hype and press one of the hottest women in Hollywood -- so I'm interested in seeing it, even if I have my doubts about the story.

I mean lets face it, the only good part of Wanted was Morgan Freeman saying "Shoot this motherfucker." The rest of that movie stank out loud. This one at least looks like it's got potential, so maybe she can get back in the swing of making films people actually want to watch, instead of movies that are only good for screencaps.

The Social Network   On the other hand, the movie who's advertising I can't seem to get away from is David Fincher's latest -- which tells the story of the beginning days and struggles of the guys who created Facebook. And wow does it look super fucking boring. Sure you've got some kids choir singing Radiohead and Justin Timberlake doing his slimy shark-suit best as the apparent villain, but let me see if I've got this straight for a second -- this is like a two-hour movie where one rich white kid takes another rich white kid to court to see who gets to keep ownership of Facebook and therefore become even richer?
Well hell, where do I sign up for that all night party of fun?
I understand it's probably a compelling story and of course relevant to the Internet generation, but movies about corporate lawsuits regardless of who is directing them are perpetually dour, which makes me wonder why it's getting such a marketing push. Is there like some zombie/sparkly vampire subplot in the middle that I'm somehow unaware of? Does Justin Timberlake transform into a car somewhere in the story and try to kill Megan Fox? Because otherwise, Radiohead or no -- I'll pass.

The Dildo Knight Unlike Andrew Breitbart, FOX News, and apparently the American Government -- I do my best to fact-check stuff before posting it on this site. I may not always have the best grasp of the possessive case or the correct use of semicolons -- but I've at least heard of Wikipedia and know how to access it.

Unfortunately, as much as I tried to find out what the heck was going on in this video clip -- there's surprisingly little information available out there about the reasoning behind this mano e' mano throwdown between this guy in the tinfoil suit of armor swinging around a whip and his opponent, who appears to be armed with nothing more than an oversized sex toy -- which is really sort of odd, since that's the sort of thing the internet was kinda built around.

Whatever the case, this exists -- and some guy who wasn't busy filming courtroom scenes for the Facebook movie caught it all on tape. Whip dude versus Dildo guy (which sounds like it ought to be a whole lot sexier) going all Thunderdome for your entertainment.
Take it away, gentlemen!

[Listening to: MC Chris - "Nrrrd Grrrl" ]

Undateable

2010-07-22T08:52:00.025-05:00

Epic mosh pit. Get your elbows up, motherfuckers!
All that being said -- what the hell, lady!?

Walking in the room scattering cat food like you're feeding a bunch of chickens -- wasswrongwitchu?

Look, I know you've got like 130 friggin' cats under your roof, which clearly makes you a shoe-in for the crazy cat lady hall of fame -- so you probably think you know a little something about taking care of the common household feline -- but take it from someone who knows, behavior like that is gonna get you eaten.

Seriously, cats don't screw around when it comes to stuff like this.

Back in the day the oldest of my two cats got tired of seeing me on the couch cuddling and petting on this incredibly sexy girl I was really digging, so when I got up to go refill our drinks she sauntered over to where my date was sitting and proceeded to drop a deuce on her shoulder.

Not near her. Not close enough so she could smell it like some territorial marking.
My cat started to take a dump on my date.

It was only sheer luck that let me see what she was trying to do seconds before it happened, which enabled me to dive across the room like MacGuyver so I could pull the girl to safety -- but that didn't stop her from having a jealous cat jump on her head while she was trying to sleep later that night, or her clothes and shoes from getting shed upon whenever the opportunity presented itself.

The two of them eventually reached a semblance of peace, but that was only after a bunch of catnip, a lot of patience, and the introduction of a new kitten (come to think of it, Aja tried to shit on her too). And even then -- now I've got to deal with two jealous felines judging anyone I try to bring home with me.

But if there's anything that proves just how much the cat runs
this house -- it's the shocking discovery I made the other day.

As many of you probably already know, I got my son a beagle puppy for Christmas this year. He's adorable and cute and all the other things that puppies invariably are, but for all his cuteness -- he's also kinda stupid (the pretty ones usually are, amirite ladies?)

To wit, housebreaking him has been a nightmare.

Although he (and I, lets be fair here -- I had to learn a few new habits too) is getting a lot better about knowing where and when to drop off his daily batches of baked goods -- this progress hasn't come without a lot of accidents, carpet stains, and raised voices along the way.

One major difference between dogs and cats is that dogs are very expressive with their eyes. There's a look a mutt will give you when he knows that he's done something bad -- sort of an ashamed half glance that lets you know it's time to put him into the kennel (which has become the conditioned punishment for soiling the rug).

But the other day I came into the living room and found the puppy already in the kennel of his own accord and already giving me the "I done a bad thing, Paw" look. I closed the gate on him, but then when I went looking around the place -- I couldn't find anything. No spots, no stains, no chewed-up stuff of any kind.

In fact, I was just about to let him back out of his makeshift cell when I smelled that familiar foul odor telling me that maybe he had done something. I tracked it down only to realize that he indeed had left a present inside the house.

But it wasn't on the carpet.
It was in the litterbox.

Damn cat's such a control freak she's telling the dog where to poop now. It's friggin crazy. I've got one of those boxes with the cover. I don't even know how he got his big ass in there, much less how he squeezed back out. But the evidence inside (oh the joys of pet ownership) was undeniable -- he had done the deed where all cats are supposed to, just like she told him to.

Seriously, what other motivation could he possibly have had for doing such a thing?

[Listening to: Sevendust - "Splinter" ]

That's My Jam: Kinda Like Tron on Acid

2010-07-21T08:16:00.008-05:00

Happened across this song the other day and found myself digging it enough to share. It's funny though, because I think this is another one of those tunes where the video definitely helps with the appeal -- and yet even though I really dig the style of animation going on here, I couldn't help but notice how much effort was put into making you think of other group's videos while you were watching the clip.

Almost as if the director's strategy was like:
"The song's OK and all -- but it might help our chances of making it a hit if we can find some way to
remind people of Zero 7 or at the very least trick them into thinking Daft Punk was somehow involved."
Look, just say they sound like Chromeo and lets all just get on with our lives, ok?

Anyways, it's a nice little change of pace from all the Sevendust I've been overloading on since their fantastic new CD came out.

See what you think -- Here's Arsenal, with Estupendo

[Listening to: Duran Duran - "The Chauffeur" ]

Still

2010-07-20T07:51:00.009-05:00

Seriously, it's been a couple of days and I'm still kinda jacked up about it.

UPDATED: I was doing some work on the site recently and came across a piece I wrote back in 2008. At the time, Inception was still little more than a cool idea in a screenwriters mind. If you've seen the movie (or even if you haven't) it's definitely worth a read. Kinda trippy, when you think about it.

[Listening to: Sevendust - "Ride Insane" ]

Everybody's Hands Go Up and They Stay There

2010-07-19T07:39:00.012-05:00

I can't even begin to tell you how funny this is to me.

-- First floor conference room door, Jax FL.
"Jesus people, we couldn't even get the room right!"

[Listening to: Namie Amuro - "Handle Me" ]

The Friday Hot Sheet

2010-07-16T08:25:00.034-05:00

Summer is racing by. The other day at the grocery store I noticed they've already got out the little separate section for school supplies. There's an email in my inbox reminding me about little league registration for the upcoming Fall season. It seems like just yesterday that I was looking forward to the end of the school year so I could spend more time with the boy.

Of course it's not really like I've lost the time completely -- but it's one of those weird times where it seems like now that it's in the past, the memory of it seems very short. Relativity at play. Almost as if my realization of all the things I'll have to do between here and the end of August to ensure that things go smoothly is somehow so much heavier than the specific memories of June and July thus far, and so all the sudden it's as the one thing is just that much more immense than the other.

Kinda weird, when you think about it.

Of course a big part of that is probably related to the way this week has been utterly lackluster at work. I've been feeling really uninspired at the office lately, which is sort of a normal summer thing I suppose -- but there's not really tons of new or particularly exciting things happening there, which sorta screws the balance of time during the individual days up. You know how it is -- when you're at work it seems like every hour of doing nothing lasts forever, but once you get home and someone asks how your day was, you've got next to nothing to report, which makes the day suddenly feel really short and inconsequential in retrospect.

All of which is to say that I'm totally psyched to see Inception this weekend.

Honestly, I really think that's what it is. All my anticipation to see Chris Nolan's latest dream within a dream within an action movie within a dream movie has got me seeing this "not a lot happened" week in terms of some wacky time versus time construct that barely even makes sense to me.

So before I start jumping around staircase looking for a fight -- here are this week’s risers and fallers, and the buzz as it looks from here:

Mel Gibson Holy crap. Have any of us had even half as bad a week as this guy has? Anybody notice how good Tiger is playing at the British Open (Don't even try to tell me those things aren't connected)? Day after day more tapes of the Road Warrior going batshit crazy -- recorded in perfect crystal clear "you just messed with the wrong woman" audio by his Russian girlfriend who is either looking to make him to confess to hitting her or find some way to prove that she isn't just making up her claims that he's a hateful, angry, unbalanced maniac who's got her scared for her and her child's life. Either way -- it's hard not to be somehow morbidly fascinated by it all (and the cute kitten recaps of the wackadoo quotes that keep coming out), even if it's just for the fact that there's just so much insane venom being revealed day after day. Seriously, who knew the guy was this far gone?

Inception I know I gushed about this in the opening paragraphs, but this is honestly the only movie I've been looking forward to in what has been a pretty lame summer season. Christopher Nolan's follow up to The Dark Knight features what appears to be a uniquely complex plot about people infiltrating and affecting the dreams of others matched with the kind of special effects that people want to see. And I don't say that lightly -- we've had movies come out this summer where characters could bend fire, movies where a child is able to do one-legged flip kick seemingly eight feet into the air, and a film where a bunch of dudes attempt to fly a tank. Essentially we're living in a computer-aided film age where just about anything you want to see is possible, and yet to have a trailer get you excited about an entire city folding over on itself is (at least for me) is pretty cool.

The odd thing is that here's a film that clearly announces itself as smart, or at the very least multi-layered -- which is a huge part of why I want to see it, and yet clearly it's got an action movie hiding inside of it (which considering Nolan's other work I'm pretty excited about too). In fact, my only real worry about this film is that much like The Matrix it will spur the growth of a super-annoying Twilight/Avatar style fanbase who try to make it out to be much more than it is.

To be perfectly honest, It's almost as if my real worry is that all the dummies who keep Adam Sandler rich will love this to the point where saying you like it too will rope you into conversations you'd normally avoid. Like I'd really prefer it if this was more my movie when I know (much like the Dark Knight) it will become a popular favorite. I'm not really 100% why that thought bothers me so much, but I suspect it comes from a feeling where I'd rather not be one of the masses when it comes to something like this -- and yet if it does take off and become the huge hit everyone expects it to be, how could you avoid it?

Maid Droid Maid Droid is the story of a future where android technology has progressed to the point where people can purchase pretty girl shaped maid robots to clean around the house and look after their children while they're at work. One family does this, but die soon afterward in an accident, leaving the child in the care of the robot hottie. He eventually (of course) falls in love with it, and a large part of the remaining story deals with their struggles to make those feelings real.

Of course many people buy the maid droids simply to have sex with them -- which requires an upgrade (suggesting the Droids are made by ..Apple?) But for whatever reason this doesn't work for the protagonists -- but the man believes that he loves the robot, so they stay together regardless.

Then while all of this is happening the remains of the original android experiment -- robot pets (which were all recalled and thrown away) somehow congeal together to form one giant robot dog, which stalks the streets of Tokyo late at night and basically rapes unsuspecting women.

Then a puppet (who is 10 times creepier than the rape dog) tries to convince us that the women like it, because that's what women really want anyways.

Add in a third story about a police detective trying to stop the rape machine (as it's known) and what you have is this odd kind of retelling of the Pinocchio story from three different angles -- except this time there's animal rape and a sixty-year old man trying to get freaky with a 20 year-old girl who's pretending to be a robot.

If this all sounds kinda creepy and pervy -- well, that's because it is. There's a lot of despicable stuff in this flick. And yet, somehow there's this sweetness to the story. I mean, you sort of have to get past the robot rape dog part to see it, but it's there. I mean, lets not lie -- this is borderline porn (depending on your sensibilities), but it's sorta weird how a day or so after seeing this I'm sorta touched by just how much heart this dirty old man fantasy movie ended up having.

I don't know -- the more Asian cinema I take in (which is admittedly not tons) the more I'm surprised by what I get out of it. It makes me think I might not have even sat through this whole film a few years back.

Still, it's an interesting and bizarre movie -- almost in an Ichi the Killer/Oldboy sort of vein -- just with more weird sex than blood and gore. Not sure I'd recommend it to everyone, but I'm kinda glad I watched it, even if it was just for the experience.

Despicable Me I had problems with my internet last week, so I wasn't able to do a Hot Sheet -- but I did want to mention this. Despicable Me is a funny movie. My son is still doing the Steve Carell villain voice -- so if you've got kids and haven't seen it yet definitely check it out.

But be warned, despite some sweet moments and memorable scenes -- I found myself kinda bored during a lot of it. If you're on the fence about this as a date flick or something to catch because you like cartoons I might suggest waiting for a rental. It leans on the cute button waaaay too much, which is part of it's charm -- but it does so in a way that feels artificial, like "Here comes the little girl character to do her cute thing again -- prepare for FLUFFY!!"

Don't get me wrong, it's a fun ride for what it is -- but it's maybe not as astounding as people are making it out to be. I mean let's face it, this has been a pretty lame summer movie-wise. So in that respect, yeah -- Despicable Me was a billion times better than the last Shrek movie. But consider what that really means, you know?

Making Money My boys in Vendetta Nation have been working hard lately, gearing up for a regional tour, promoting their upcoming album, and getting the video for their first single finished. It's always weird seeing your friends in things like this (not to mention the fact that a good half of this was shot at Endo) -- but I really dig this song, so I thought I'd pass it on to you.
See what you think!

[Listening to: Ida Maria - "I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked" ]

Big In Japan

2010-07-15T08:49:00.028-05:00

Celebrity is an odd thing. Not just in the way it is so frequently created, fueled, and maintained by the media and the various industries that feed off it -- but even moreso for the way that once that boat is pushed into the water, so much of the public (especially in this country) strives to keep it afloat with adoration, even when there really doesn't seem to be much reason to still think of these people as famous.

Especially now, where the Paris Hiltons and Justin Biebers of the world can attain certain levels of notoriety before ever getting a television show, movie role, book deal, or recording contract -- it's almost frightening to consider just how much power a Cult of Personality can wield in this modern age.

Not that I'm claiming to stand above it all and judge everyone else from upon high. I've enjoyed my fair share of reality shows. I've seen Kim Kardashian naked. I'm also a regular practitioner in the surely equally manufactured underside of the manufactured fame industry -- the snarky backlash side that keeps these names in rotation and public view, even while we're making fun of them.

Viral Marketing is the new Ninjitsu.

It's my belief (based on personal experience and the continued popularity of outlets like TMZ, People magazine, etc) that Americans are by and large the worst offenders of this idolatry worldwide. Our all too materialistic culture is frequently defined by it's extremes -- and in a society where the idea of wealth being the easiest path to happiness, those who not only have achieved success but are wildly popular and visible about it seem to embody the highest level of that kind of ambition for many people.

But I'm continually fascinated by the fact that we're not the only nation who plays this game.

Have you ever had this happen -- you're watching a movie, and there's some actor or actress in it that really impresses you -- either because of their talent, their looks, or their ability to make you laugh, but when you see their name in the credits you realize you have no idea who they are?

So then you pop their name into Google, or jump on IMDB to see if they've been in anything else you might have heard of and it becomes suddenly apparent that they're actually a huge star in Europe (or wherever), and that the movie you you saw them in was actually just their first attempt to try to break into Hollywood?

There are thriving celebrity systems in many countries across the world that people in this country are for the most part completely unaware of. Mel Gibson's girlfriend (the one he's been yelling obscenities at in those tapes that have been dominating the media lately) is apparently a famous singer in Russia who's written songs for many western artists, including Josh Groban. Rain, star of the recent film flop Ninja Assassin is an absolute superstar in Korea -- wowing audiences with his music, dancing, and acting.

Names that are all but invisible to audiences over here.

Part of that can easily be blamed on the overabundance of American celebrity news dominating our attention span for such things -- but it's also no secret that historically as a nation, the United States is generally uninterested in things the rest of the world goes crazy for.

Right or wrong -- from the Metric System to the World Cup, most of us just don't care.

Part of this I imagine is simply lack of exposure. I enjoy international music, authors, and movies -- but I don't always go seeking them out. There's so much media available these days, and I'm at an age where so many of my tastes and preferences have become ingrained that much like choosing a restaurant to go to, seeking international entertainment fare is often a function of mood, of an occasional desire for something new and different.

But I'd be lying if I didn't consider the fact that some of it has to be cultural.

Bollywood is fascinating. It's frenetic, musical, hyper-colored, and relentlessly happy. But I think for many people it's still something of a novelty. Something to be enjoyed as much for it's unintentional comedic value as it's talent -- which unfortunately reflects a lot of western attitudes towards Indian and Hindu culture. The same could easily be said of the Internets fascination with Japanese pop culture, or America's long standing love affair with British Comedy.

It makes you wonder if the reverse is true of international
audiences experiencing American movies, music or TV.

It's well known that a big part of the money that Hollywood films count on these days is from international releases. That even when fickle audiences in the states turn their backs on blockbusters or big name stars that they can still survive based on the returns from foreign theater sales. But do these worldwide audiences spend money on Hollywood films because they genuinely like them, or is it more like the way we all sort of laugh and point at Telemundo?

The reason I bring this up is because I need to understand something:

See, recently I got a review of Sting's new album published over at O Hell Nawl. The album itself is a collection of hits spanning Stings career both with the Police and as a solo artist, performed by Sting and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra -- which, despite the possibilities for an interesting new take on these familiar melodies by a talented musician, is actually pretty terrible. Imagine Muzak versions of "Roxanne" and "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" and you'll get pretty close to what the album sounds like.

But along the way to writing the review, I did some research on the record label hoping to get some more details about the disc --

And I stumbled across this.

Rock Symphonies is the latest release from David Garrett -- he of the douchetastic sorta-beard and shaved chest.

If you've never heard of this guy, don't feel bad -- because I had no idea who he was either. A quick check of the Wikipedia reveals that he's the current Guinness World Record holder as the world's fastest violinist, the recipient of several international awards including a Golden Camera at the Cannes Film Festival, and a Man of the Year award in 2008 from GQ magazine (in Germany).

Further digging reveals that Garrett is an internationally renowned virtuoso, who's been winning competitions and impressing audiences with his skill since the age of five. Born in Germany to an American Mother and a German father -- he's studied under a variety of master players in addition to spending time at various music conservatories including Julliard honing his craft -- where he earned extra money on the side working as a male model.

This is just another piece of evidence to support my theory
that Hot Eurotrash guys can basically get away with anything.

Maybe it's because the World Cup just ended, but there's something kind of annoying about the free reign these dudes seem to get just because they have a six-pack and an accent. It's understandable of course, I react the same way over hot chicks -- but here's a guy who already had a calling card. Already had an actual talent. Already was naturally good looking.

So what's with the spray-on beard there, Davey?

It's like someone took Criss Angel and David Spade, threw them in a blender, and poured the results out on a plate filled with sharktooth necklaces and pimp rings.

And if the album cover wasn't enough to make you laugh, then feel free to look under the cover and discover the hilarity that are his cheese-tastic arrangements of such classics like "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Master of Puppets," Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" and Aerosmith's "Walk This Way."

Oh yeah, he’s that guy.

It's no secret that I have a special bottle of hate stored away for orchestras that do try to do pop/rock music. To a classical music fan like me, it's not only a laughable waste of talent -- but above everything else it's pandering to the highest degree. Nothing's more annoying to me than living in a town with a long-established Symphony Orchestra only to find out that one of their upcoming concert features them performing the music of Michael Jackson. I can understand the need to attract new audiences who's attention is focused elsewhere -- but there's reaching across the aisle and then there's just pretending you're something that you're not.

But then again, I don't live in Germany.

The one thing I do know about living in America is that what frequently seems like our overwhelming taste rarely represents individual likes and dislikes. I can sorta see how if you didn't live in this country you might think that we all love Britney Spears or Tom Cruise or Lady Gaga or Tyler Perry or whatever. Anyone who lives here knows that isn't the case -- but it's fairly easy to see how that impression might come off, especially for people living in a culture outside our own who might look in on American music and movies the same way we approach ordering take out food.

So my question is this – is it the same internationally?

Are there people in Germany who bust out laughing at the sight of this guy? Are there a small but vocal faction of people on his various fan-sites who are all like "He used to be cool?" Is this whole Rock Symphonies thing sort of an embarrassment to people who've been with him since the beginning, where he’s banking on his past glories and good looks to wow his already won-over audience?

Even though many of us are just finding out about David Garrett for the
first time -- Are we just in time to see the dawning of his Fat Elvis stage?

[Listening to: David Bowie - "Strangers When We Meet" ]

Alan Smithee

2010-07-14T13:48:00.016-05:00

The web is full of cool toys.

I happened upon this thing sometime yesterday afternoon while bopping around the web. It's a little widget that lets you paste in snippets of your work into a form, which it then "analyzes" in order to let you know which famous author your particular style most resembles.

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall..

What followed was an interesting game of copy and paste from this blog, from other published works, and my own archives.

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
Margaret Atwood
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I write like
J. D. Salinger
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

It was fun, a nice little ego stroke, and some of the results were surprising -- but then something weird happened.

I kinda started to wonder where these results were coming from.

I think at first it was a case of wanting more information. Of wanting a more specific pat on my own back. Whatever the motivation, I began to find myself curious why some random computer program decided that my writing was like Vonnegut. What was it specifically that kicked that name back to me in the results?

But unless I was missing something on the website, there was nothing like that available at all.

Did you ever have the experience as a kid where you saw some toy on a TV commercial, or on the back of a comic book, or on the shelf at the toy store -- and everything about it seemed like the coolest thing ever created, which sent you into Jedi levels of begging and pleading until someone got it for you? Maybe it was that little whatsit on the back of your cereal box that you had to mail off for -- and every day of those 4-6 weeks waiting by the mailbox for it to arrive built the coolness of it up in your mind more and more and more until the day when it finally arrived --

Only to have it be the lamest toy ever?

Like it wouldn't even do half the things the commercial said it would, or it did -- but only if you had a backyard shaped like a miniature Grand Canyon that was already set up with all the associated bad guy toys, vehicles, and a gang of AAA batteries (not included)?

Part of me really wants to believe that an objective, computerized third party actually took the time to consider my words and style, fed them into some complicated algorithm, and came back with a detailed and confident comparison of my writing to those already in the canon.

But the rest of me is pretty sure this thing is just a random name generator, which kinda sucks.

[Listening to: The Roots - "How I Got Over" ]

Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen

2010-07-13T12:52:00.005-05:00

Well this certainly explains a lot.

[Listening to: Missy Elliott - "Lick Shots" ]

Where Are You From?

2010-07-12T09:54:00.016-05:00

So the other day I was driving home from work, when I came across a prime example of what life in my city is really like:

There were three or four of us moving down our side of a two-lane residential road. The leader of our unofficial pack as driving an oversized black pickup truck with an overabundance of aftermarket chrome and one of those tribal tattoo-looking window stickers in the shape of an 8-point buck, tailed by a white windowless van (natch), followed by my red Mustang (which, whether I like to admit it or not -- is tres Freakville).

Anyways, we're all heading towards an intersection when the line unexpectedly slowed down after the black pickup's brakelights lit up. Once it came to a full stop -- the door opened and a man got out.
Tall, short sleeved button-up shirt with khaki slacks, some sort of
crew cut hairstyle and a freshly lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
At first it was unclear why he stopped. But as he walked towards the middle of the street I caught sight of a small shape in the road, which turned out to be some sort of turtle.

Can't be really sure what type it was exactly, but knowing this area it was probably a Gopher Tortoise -- which, like so many of his cute but perpetually roadkilled brethren decided that crossing a busy street filled with cars is a totally logical idea.

If you've never lived in the South and don't really know what it's like -- this is a perfect example of the attitudes you'll see a lot of around here. Here's a guy in a quintessential hunters whip, taking extra time out of his day to help out a helpless animal at risk -- a scene that on the surface might seem like a contradiction, but actually fits completely with the hunter as naturalist mindset that's so prevalent in this part of the country.

Of course there's the South and then there's Jacksonville -- a distinction I was abruptly reminded of when the Good Samaritan with the crew cut finally caught up to the turtle in the road,
Where he proceeded to kick it over to the safety of the other side of the road with one shot.

[Listening to: Beastie Boys - "Professor Booty" ]

I'm Just Talkin 'Bout Shaft

2010-07-06T10:14:00.009-05:00

In Northern Kyūshū born and raised, on the playground was where I spent most of my days..

-- via the always awesome Blame My Robot

[Listening to: Bjork - "Army of Me" ]

Actually Spoken During the Course of My Day

2010-07-05T08:36:00.003-05:00

"If giving oral can kill you, then I must be the Highlander."

[Listening to: Lifer - "Breathless" ]

Midnight Sun

2010-07-04T07:43:00.008-05:00

The July 4th weekend is many things. A remembrance of national independence. A welcome three-day respite from working. A well-timed reason for family gatherings. A convenient excuse for me to post this picture of Esther Baxter. It was also my late grandmother's birthday -- which usually resulted in some sort of family gathering and the inevitable arguments and drama she seemingly enjoyed cultivating.

Once upon a time it was my wedding anniversary as well.

There was a danger there for a while after things fell apart and people passed away where this weekend could have been a real bummer. I suppose it was the first few times around -- but the 4th of July weekend for many years was also the home of one of my favorite things in the whole world --

The annual Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci Fi channel.

Have I mentioned how much I love the Twilight Zone? How I would argue with my parents to stay up just a little bit later so I could watch re-runs of it (and the Outer Limits) on TV? That my nickname in 6th grade was TZ? That I even tried to enjoy and be a fan of the "modernized" version of the show that came out in the mid-80's?

Every 4th of July (and New Years Eve) the Sci-Fi channel would run a marathon. Hours upon hours of classic episodes back to back. It was a heaven like no other -- a nerd paradise, thought-provoking distraction, trip down memory lane, and drinking game all in one place. And it was all mine.

Back in the day that was sort of the appeal of the Sci Fi network. Whether it was because they didn't have the rights to many shows or hadn't gotten on the kick of making their own terrible, terrible movies yet -- they used to play all the old shows. All the classic stuff. There were many times when I'd be watching some show on that network where I'd think to myself, "I bet I'm the only one out there who likes this at all."

150 episodes of black and white melodrama from the 60's. Theater style dialogue and sets. Heavy-handed social commentary that frequently dealt with long-forgotten subjects. Everybody in almost every episode smoking cigarettes. Special effects that seem laughable by modern standards.

Even if you kinda liked the series, it wasn't just anybody who could sit through two days of it without eventually burning out.
And yet she did, every year.

It's one of the many, many things that made her special. That linked us in a way that I think even we were surprised by. An intelligent, charismatic, stunner of a woman who watches both Twilight Zone marathons every year? Who actually gets anxious waiting for it to start? Who won't leave the house or go to bed because she's afraid she'll miss her favorite episodes?

We'd watch it together -- counting the Burgess Meredith episodes, patiently waiting for them to play "Time Enough At Last."

Even when we were separated by miles or circumstances, you'd find us on the phone -- watching it together (in a sense), commenting on the episodes and falling into the same side conversations we'd surely talked about the year before.

This might not make sense to everyone who reads it -- but watching the Twilight Zone marathon together was the only thing we ever really planned to do that we actually saw through, instead of getting ..distracted.

I suppose it all sounds kinda corny. Nerdy at the very least. But when you find something like that, especially when it comes with the deepest, most intoxicating eyes you've ever stared into, a body that could stop traffic, and a mischievous spirit that made every moment together an adventure -- none of those names people might call you didn't even matter.

All that really mattered was the way we felt. The way we were together.

People didn't understand. But then again, most folks never really took the time to find out. There were so many other details on the surface available to focus on, so many obvious question marks.

So many things that normally wouldn't make sense.

It's like that sometimes -- The owner of a ticking stopwatch who can move around as he pleases even though time all around seems to have stopped. A coin landing perfectly on it's side -- giving the man who flipped it the ability to read the minds of everyone around him. Five strangers dressed in costumes (an soldier, a clown, a hobo, a ballet dancer, and a bagpiper) wake up to find themselves trapped in a giant cylinder-shaped prison cell with no memory of who they are or how they got there. A woman obsessed by the fact that she doesn't look like "everybody else" undergoes repeated plastic surgery operations to correct her horrible facial disfigurements -- all without success.

Things don't always have to make sense on the surface to work. To mean something special. To enrich your life. In a lot of ways that's what makes those connections unique. What makes them worth fighting for.

It's also why it hurts so much when those same things fall apart.

For some idiot reason, the SyFy channel (nice name change, douchebags) decided not to broadcast the July 4th Twilight Zone marathon this year.

I went looking for it again, but it wasn't there.

No Shatner on the plane. No Billy Mumy setting his neighbors on fire with his mind. No Roscoe from The Dukes of Hazzard marrying a witch. No phone calls when Burgess Meredith goes on trial for being the last man on earth to believe in God. No more suddenly realizing that the guidebook the Aliens gave us called "To Serve Man" was actually a cookbook.

No more Midnight Sun.

I know someone will say that all the episodes are available somewhere on DVD. That it wouldn't take that much time and effort at all to collect and create my own marathon just like the original. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if someone suggested that I find a new show to watch, let things in the past go and move onto something that's actually available and playing now.

Who knows, maybe they're right. There's really no way to know what the future holds. Really no way to live forever in a dream.

Not in this world, at least.

[Listening to: Namie Amuro - "No" ]

The Friday Hot Sheet

2010-07-02T09:08:00.072-05:00

Weird week. Full of stops and starts. Heatwave mornings followed by what seemed like torrential rainstorms -- bringing mosquitoes in full force, like bosses nitpicking about dress codes or font sizes on memorandums. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a full-on disaster week or anything, but there were times when the whole exercise felt more like a road full of potholes and speedbumps.

Slowing you to a crawl when you were feeling like you didn't want to mess up your suspension,
Shaking you to death if you tried to go faster in an effort to just find some way out of it all.

There were good things that did happen. I got to spend extended time with my little boy, and when I was at the office I was able to clear away some long festering projects that were on hold pending someone else getting off their ass and finally doing their part of things -- but I decided a long time ago that no job would ever be my life, so when I come to the end of a seven-day stretch and all I can look back on is paperwork off of my desk, it tends to leave a less than sweet taste in my mouth.

Of course it could just be the time of year. The coincidences of the dates. The things
seemingly too far away for me to be able to change without help. You never can tell.

What I do know is that July somehow snuck up on me before I realized it was actually here. Like the days felt the same -- but when the names switched over from June suddenly it felt almost like a huge chunk of the summer was just ..gone.

Next thing you know you start worrying how much of it you have left.

Makes me miss Summer Break from school (both as a student and when I was working as a teacher) -- which always had a way of feeling kinda endless -- even when in reality it was only just a couple of months.

So before I start buying trapper keepers and new school clothes -- here are this week’s risers and fallers, and the buzz as it looks from here:

The iPhone Word is starting to circulate that Verizon (my network) will start selling and supporting the iPhone sometime next January. Of course that's a long way off, and as those of us who waited for the Verizon Android phones to come out (or sat at home patiently waiting for Apple to let them have their upgrade) know all too well -- in cel phone land, a promise with a date on it is worth about as much as the promise of a flash-enabled operating system.

But this development adds an odd little wrinkle to things. Despite recent bad press about problems with the iPhone 4 (first releases are always a little buggy, I suppose), it's still the most fully realized experience of all the smartphones out there. I adore my Droid -- but one of the reasons I went for it was that I wanted the same kind of access and functionality my iPhone friends had without having to kneel over and take it from AT&T again like I did back when they were my carrier (long story). And while I think the Android system is an adequate rival and could maybe one day even overtake Apples design -- right now it's a clear second place runner. That's to say nothing of the fact that every fix or advance to the Android system seems to be released as part of a different phone, and not just an update that everyone has to wait for with baited breath the way all my iPhone friends had been the past few weeks.

Come January the full picture will probably be a lot clearer, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only Android user who's ears pricked up when that announcement started circulating. Who knows, I might have to make a tough decision about all this in the upcoming winter?

The Last Airbender Wow -- read any bad reviews lately? I know a couple of people who have seen The Last Airbender (all of whom so far have hated it, btw -- one guy even said "I don't want to talk about it, that's how mad I am"). Granted, there's a lot of reasons to dislike this film. If the complaints of the national critics are to be believed -- the 3D is terrible (apparently you can watch most of the film with your 3D glasses off), the story is incomprehensible, the child actors are wooden and unappealing, all of the Asian characters from the original animated series have all been recast using American and European actors (read: white people), the fight scenes don't actually involve any physical contact (the combatants all do these jazz hand moves that propel different elements like fire, water, wind, and dirt at each other) and that guy from The Daily Show isn't even funny in it.

Which begs the question -- How much more is it going to take before people finally admit that despite The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan is a talentless hack? Seriously, how many more bombs does this guy have to drop?

It's one thing to put out adolescent-minded garbage in the name of selling toys. But it's quite another to just ride on name recognition (not only his, but of the goodwill that people feel for what is a really good and frequently overlooked animated show) as an excuse to put out crappy work. And that's what his last few movies have really felt like. Lady in the Water was a mess. And don't even get me started on The Happening.

My son has been asking to see it based off the commercials and the marketing, and I've been doing almost everything I can to talk him out of it. And I'm the guy who sat through both Chipmunk movies in the theater for him.

Chocolate Maybe one of the reasons these crappy huge budget studio pictures annoy me is that they make it easy to miss out on other stuff. Like this fantastic little Thai martial arts/action film directed by Prachya Pinkaew. I'm still relatively new to the particular style and pacing movies from Thailand bring with them, and like I've said in the past -- I can't even be sure that the action films I've seen are a good representation of what that country's cinema has to offer as a whole, but man did I get engrossed in this film.

The odd thing about it is that if it were an American studio movie (or worse if Hollywood ever tried to remake it) Chocolate would be the sort of thing I would avoid like the plague, mainly because of the way Hollywood tends to overblow what on the surface seems like cliche elements in the plot.

Basically, it's the story of an autistic girl who discovers that she can mimic actions and mannerisms (including varied martial arts fighting styles) simply by watching them -- and her struggle to help pay for her ailing mother's hospital and medicine bills by trying to collect money she is owed by local businessmen -- Which when you read it over probably puts all sorts of bad Julia Roberts/Jessica Alba type images into your head, but do all you can to erase those preconceptions -- because there's a lot more at work here.

All of this is wrapped up in an organized crime story steeped with racial tensions and deep-seated cultural attitudes about the disabled. Eventually it boils down into an action-heavy ending, but not until it's emotionally wrapped you up in the main characters stories first.

It's also got a very dry, very subtle sense of humor -- and a Kill Bill-type action sequence that builds into one of the coolest side fights since The Bride went one-on-one with Gogo -- where literally one autistic character takes on another one, which could have ended up being some sort of tasteless South Park gag, but instead has you on the edge of your seat wanting to see what's going to happen next.

The only thing that still sits weird with me (and I'm still not really sure why) is the appearance of transvestites and cross-dressers as villains. As I've discussed on this page before, it's apparently a pretty normal thing in Thai cinema -- but it's still sort of jarring for my admittedly Western sensibilities to have a bunch of drag queens with guns show up in the middle of things when you're not expecting them.

Btw -- for an added bonus, hand around for the credits, where they do the Jackie Chan trick of showing the accident reel where fight scenes go wrong. To see some of these stunts and battles in the movie is jaw-dropping enough, but to realize just how risky they actually were adds a completely different dimension to it all.

$750 Million No one's gonna stand here and tell you that Tiger Woods wasn't a jackass and didn't get what he deserved for the actions he decided to take. He disrespected his own legacy, betrayed his marriage, and embarrassed his wife and family. But man -- $750 Million is a lot of fucking money. I know I couldn't have been the only one who winced when I first saw that figure (I know reports are now saying that the actual payout is closer to $100 million, but even so -- that initial number had to come from somewhere, right?).

The press on the matter says the main part of the deal that came with this huge payout is that Tiger's former wife can't go to the press, or write a book, or talk about the scandal in any way. That in addition to being a nest egg to support the children with and a financial penalty for betraying the vows of his marriage -- it's also essentially some sort of hush-money payoff for her agreed silence as he tries to rebuild his shattered public image.

I suppose we could sit here all day and argue the monetary amount, the settlement, the audacity of his actions, or the trials and tribulations of the spouses of the rich and famous -- but really all of that has been beaten to death in the tabloids and on the news.
What I'm more curious about now is Elin Nordegren.
Tiger will go back to playing golf. He'll be the butt of a bunch of jokes for a while until he eventually starts winning tournaments again and then -- like it or not, eventually it will wash off of him the way it did for Kobe Bryant.
But what about her?
What exactly does one do when you're still pissed off, still sort of the victim in all this, and now in possession of several hundred million dollars of F-U money? I think it's a pretty safe bet to assume that she's not gonna run off to New York and start dating A-Rod. Can't really see her getting on Facebook and looking up Roger Clemens, Al Gore, Jesse James, or Ben Rothlisberger either, you know?
So what is she gonna do -- Go all Anna Nicole Smith on us? Balloon up ten sizes,
crack out, and start showing up in diet pill commercials and Kanye West videos?
What little we know of her private nature from the news suggests that probably won't be the case, but it is a possible outcome (in that purely mathematical sense kinda like the possibility that she'll start calling my phone tomorrow -- not that I would really mind that, Elin). But lets face it, no matter who you are or where you're from -- suddenly getting a hold of $750 million has got to change your perspective on the world a little bit.

I mean yeah, there was a real-life drama here at one point, but am I the only one who is seeing the beginning seeds of an epic science-fiction/comic book plot here? A bitter mother with young children -- secured in some remote Swedish mountaintop hideaway concealed from the world press, insulated by more money than some governments will ever see -- seething, training, growing stronger, developing a deep seated animosity for guys in red polo shirts and black baseball hats.. Some sort of academy for golf-hating supervillains who's only Kryptonite is Gatorade Fierce?

I'm telling you, there's one heck of a movie hiding in all of this (as long as they don't let M. Night Shyamalan direct it).

Milkshake You know what? Keep all your super-hot shirtless Eurotrash World Cup guys. Your hunky firemen and creole-accented co-stars from True Blood. You can have Twilight. Keep all those moping sparkly vampires and shape-shifting werewolf llama boys to yourself. These things come and these things go. They're all just another fad like boy bands and pro wrestling. Sure it might bring all the girls to the yard now -- but when those girls grow up to be real women, what is it that they really want?
That's right baby, a dude with a guitar.

[Listening to: Janelle Monae - "Faster" ]

Where Are You From?

2010-07-01T11:01:00.007-05:00

Because I live here.

- via Unmuse

The first time I saw this I sorta chuckled at it a bit, especially the way who ever filmed this made my city look so friggin' clean -- but this morning I'm watching it again and you know what?

It ain't really that bad.

I don't know -- sometimes you stay in a place to long it's hard not to see it through the same set of eyes and think it's always one way or another. That's not to say that I've come to the decision that Freakville is suddenly Shangri-La or whatever, but sometimes it is a little easy to overlook things about this place. Either that or I'm just hungry -- and that crab boil is looking really damn good right about now.

Go ahead, girl -- do what you do.

[Listening to: Genesis - "Abacab" ]

That's My Jam: Ya'll Want This Party Started Right?

2010-06-30T08:32:00.007-05:00

His name is Daler Mehndi. The song is called Tunak Tunak Tun. I don't know much more about it than that -- but really, do you need to?

No lie, this is the jam right here.

-- The intro drags out a little, but stick around -- it's worth it.

I mean sure there's sort of an initial comedic value to it all (especially if you don't get much of a chance to see or hear this sort of thing on the regular) -- but don't act all surprised when you start getting pulled into the beat by the second time that chorus comes back around.

Btw -- The Jersey Shore fist pump? Old and Busted.
New Hotness? Whatever you want to call the jazz hands dude's running with here.

[Listening to: Eminem - "Not Afraid" ]

Delia You Are a Flake

2010-06-29T09:25:00.004-05:00

Having one of those days but just can't find the right words?
Help has arrived.

- Language deliciously NSFW. Enjoy!

[Listening to: Telefon Tel Aviv - "My Week Beats Your Year" ]

Wishmaster

2010-06-28T08:43:00.006-05:00

Even if it takes you a few moments to put it together, it's worth it.

-- via Blame My Robot

[Listening to: Prince - "Adore" ]

The Friday Hot Sheet

2010-06-25T08:13:00.068-05:00

Have you ever had one of those weeks where it seems like you charge into the first few days full of momentum, and then somewhere in the middle of things your toe catches an edge on the floor or someone tosses a banana peel on the floor in front of you or whatever, and the next thing you know you're just sort of banging your head against some sort wall over and over again.

Why do I keep doing that?

External factors like work and weather and all the little hassles that seem to rise up day to day play a big part, but I'm always sort of surprised when all those small things can get in the way, especially when you start off the first few days at such a full charge.

I suppose a big part of it is your individual perception of how much those slings and arrows cut into you when they hit. I mean when you get right down to it, some things truly are inconsequential -- and get crushed easily under the rolling thunder of your own awesomeness as you come across them. But there's always that one knife you don't see coming towards the middle of your back (literally).

All that being said, it wasn't the worst week I've ever had -- but something about the way it more or less ended definitely didn't match the way it got going, and there's something sort of disappointing about that, you know?

Still, the cool thing about our self-imposed seven day cycles is that they eventually come to an end and you get to start all over on the next one. And even the most lack-luster of weeks at the job can be easily washed away by a couple of days at the beach or sitting by the pool.

So before we close the book on this latest adventure from hell -- here are this week’s risers and fallers, and the buzz as it looks from here:

The
World
Cup The US team pretty much had to get a win. But I suspect that even folks in this country who are rabid soccer fans quietly worried that once again they wouldn't be able to get one. It's the kind of tension that would usually make a sporting event a magnet for anticipation and coverage -- but would that same feeling hold true for a sport most of the country doesn't care about?

It's sort of weird, because in a strange way it's almost as if the national annoyance over soccer in general somehow shifted into sort of a secret curiosity, perhaps spurred by vuvuzela hate and the way social sites like twitter tend to create buzz around events even if it's just for the snark factor -- people started tuning in. You'd catch it on the TV's in the breakroom at work, kind of on in the background with people absently looking on.

It's still a deathly slow and boring sport to watch on television. But in an odd way, I think it's slow-as-molasses pacing actually helped things (at least on the east coast where I was), as the action in the game didn't really take off until almost lunchtime, where people sitting down in the office cafe or hanging out at local restaurants had a chance to see Landon Donovan snag that rebound and do what previous games featuring the American team had not been able to do -- create legitimate excitement.

Does this win mean that the sport will finally get it's due in this country? No. Let's be honest here -- the Americans could make history and win this whole thing and the sport would still be forgotten and pushed aside once the NFL gets going again, but as far as a step in a good direction (or perhaps better said a step away from a death knell)? Not too shabby.

Grown Ups Ugh. The sooner this movie goes away the better -- but it's probably a safe bet we'll be dealing with it for a few more weeks despite all the crappy reviews. The big question is whether or not it will be able to knock off the success of Toy Story 3, which to no one's surprise has been going like crazy with kids and adults alike who've grown up with the franchise (I saw it with my son last week -- it's a sweet little film).

At the same time -- I think that's part of what really bothers me about this obvious cash grab featuring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Chris Rock.

With all these big names, you'd think they would be talented enough to put together a truly original funny movie that could take on a kids movie like Toy Story and put up a legitimate battle for a box office weekend -- but instead they held it back a week, where the returns will be a little easier to snipe at -- which to me clearly indicates that even the studio knows it's just another helping of the same crap we've grown used to seeing lately (I find it particularly telling that most of the scenes featured in the trailers and advertisements show the cast sitting down).

As such, don't be surprised to see commercials next week proclaiming Grown Ups as "The Number 1 Comedy Movie in America" or some such kissing-your-sister type of tagline that attempts to drum up extra hype for the thing while sort of not admitting that Pixar still beat them out in it's second weekend.

And you might be asking yourself -- "What's the big deal, why do you even care?" And the answer is simple -- after the success of Couples Retreat last year and the moderate returns of Gary Marshall's Valentines Day, the groundwork has been laid for more of these lazy ensemble-cast movies to come out. Sometimes you group talented people together and get good results, like Anchorman or The Hangover -- but most times a film like this is about creating a name product that people recognize and aren't afraid to see. In other words, Grown Ups only needs to be familiar enough for people to want to show up to see it to make money.
When you think about it, a movie like this doesn't really have to be any good to be a success.
Personally I would like to see more movies where Chris Rock gets to be more than a bit player. But if all he has to do every summer is wait for Sandler to call him up to be in the sequel to this and collect another $20 million for doing nothing, then where does that get us?

True
Blood The HBO hillbilly vampire hit True Blood is back for it's third season -- and as much as I enjoy it's trashy humor, gratuitous nudity, and non-sparkly vampire violence goodness -- am I the only one who tuned into this season expecting to see more equal opportunity bawdiness only to notice that the veneer has finally been pulled away to reveal the fact that what I thought was a sassy little HBO show with blood and boobs is actually a show about hot guys talking to and/or killing other hot guys?

It's always good to have a show you can share with people, especially when it's an HBO show that doesn't skew too hard one way or the other (like Sex in the City or Entourage tend to do) and for a while True Blood seemed to be that show. But at least for me the first two episodes of this new season have been leaning hard on scenes featuring dudes bare asses and Vampires named Bill enchanting guys named Hoyt to take a showers with them.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
It's still a fun show, but what I always perceived as a sexy balance to the storylines has at least in these early season episodes been sorta thrown away in favor of what seems to be an effort to try and lure away Twihards on the eve of their new movie hitting the screens.

Podcasts I'm not really sure what sparked my curiosity this week as opposed to others -- but I went on a podcast listening kick the last couple of days (although to be honest, now I kinda wish I hadn't). There have been a few podcasts I've heard in the past to varying returns, but not to the point where I was really addicted or disgusted in any sort of way. For example -- being a big fan of Adam Carolla's old radio show on KLSX, it was only natural to check out podcasts of previous episodes or show's that I'd missed for whatever reason (which translated into following his still-running podcast show to this day) And being a big movie nerd I tended to check out the Onion AV Club's regular Friday discussions whenever I wanted to hear about new movies coming out.
But I never really got much deeper into that particular world, you know?
I think a big part of the reason was that I don't really enjoy audio blogging. I'm a reader, I like seeing the written word. I like the thought process it invokes. The selected podcasts I did partake in were more like talk radio shows (another medium I like -- albeit in moderation). But this week during a particularly slow stretch at work where I guess the music choices on my iPod weren't doing much to inspire me I decided to check out a few podcasts I hadn't heard before -- including a sports discussion hosted on one of my favorite pro football sites, and a movie round table that's started up over at Filmdrunk.
Both were horrid.
Maybe it's because both podcasts seem relatively new (I could be wrong about that) and they haven't found their stride yet, or that there wasn't much interesting to talk about film-wise or sports-wise (even though I opened the sports podcast specifically because of a discussion they were having regarding the hometown Jacksonville Jaguars) -- but the results I found were more akin to a bunch of kids on headsets bantering about while playing Call of Duty rather than anything approaching a talk show or a guerrilla radio broadcast.

The Jaguars discussion (a topic I'm planning on writing more about soon) was particularly awful -- as an assembled group of "professional sports bloggers" (ugh) interviewed a blogger dedicated to covering just one team (double ugh) in an effort to discuss the struggles of the team in recent years to sell tickets in a small market. Essentially it was three guys trying to make jokes from a national perspective while one local honk (who was breathing so heavily you could literally feel his fatness through your headphones) insisted that they didn't understand the uniqueness of the Jacksonville market and then tried (between bites of his ham sandwich, apparently) to explain every banal detail of the teams existence in this city over the last ten years.

In a flash I realized just how fortunate I have been to come across the bloggers and radio hosts that I read and listen to on a regular basis -- because apparently there is a whole other side of things out there that just stinks out loud.

YouTube Musicians Speaking of would be stars taking up space on the Internet -- following the runaway success of Justin Bieber and ..that other kid, Brett over at the always awesome Viral Video Film School took some time to show us some of the other undiscovered musical talents on the web (especially the guitar guy at the top of the stairs in the warehouse working as hard as he possibly can to get those three lame pentatonic riffs to come out of his fingers and the karaoke mom) leading to the creation of this little compilation video, which makes me giggle every time I see it.
Or at least it does until that last guy shows up with a carload of what!?

Like this video? Good, because it autoplays the next episode unless you tell it to stop.

[Listening to: Lil Mama Vs. Marnie Stern - "Absorb the Lipgloss" ]

Desktop Disco

2010-06-24T13:52:00.016-05:00

Ok friends, I need your help again.

Based off your nearly unanimous votes last time around, the desktop background on my work computer currently looks like this:

For those who might not immediately recognize it as something other than a cool picture -- it's a still photo from Spinal Tap illustrating guitarist Nigel Tufnel's point about how his guitar amps "go to 11".

Loved having this up there on my computer -- but it's been there for a while, and I'm starting to wear out on it a little bit.

So it's time for a new desktop picture. Just like last time, I've got a couple of pics stored on my hard drive that I can't decide between -- and I figured, "What the hell, lets try this again."

But before we do -- a quick note:

This is a work computer. Or perhaps better said -- this isn't my computer. So even though it's clear the IT department and the managers above don't have a problem with employees like me personalizing the screen they let me use, it also is a pretty safe bet that they would probably start having an issue if I were to start using racy or nsfw images on there.

So as much as I would truly love to use it, this particular image won't be among the candidates in the running this week:

Although if there was ever an image that better describes the corporate experience, I'd like to see it.

Anyways, here are this week's choices. Feel free post a comment below to let me know which one you like better.

This One?
Or This One?

Sort of a movie theme, dude.

Anyways, this is where you guys come in. Just post a comment to let me know which one you'll like better, and I'll make it my new desktop background for the next couple of weeks.

What Say You?

[Listening to: Me'Shell NdegéOcello - "Relief: A Stripper Classic" ]

Wanna Get Away?

2010-06-23T09:30:00.006-05:00

[Listening to: Tupac Shakur - "It's All About You" ]

Sploosh

2010-06-22T09:30:00.012-05:00

Man it's hot outside lately. All this summer heat lately feels like a blanket fresh from a hot dryer thrown on top of your shoulders while you're sitting in the middle of an oven. And every day it seems like it just rains down on you.

But you know what could fix it? You know what would make all this better? Ice cream.

No, wait.
..I've got a better idea.

[Listening to: Jace Everett - "Bad Things" ]

Amaranthine

2010-06-21T08:02:00.031-05:00

I write too much.

Not so much that I update more often than I need to, but that when I get going on a topic I frequently have trouble getting myself to stop. It's an issue I've been aware of for a long time. Pretty much as long as I've been writing stuff for the web. But especially now as my work is starting to find it's way to other outlets. Especially as the web continues to lean towards becoming something people look at on a screen on their phone.

I mean, on this blog I have the freedom to do what I want. Write pages of ideas and ramble through whatever topic I'm focused on at the time. But lately I've been sending stuff around for review and publication -- and all it ever seems I do anymore is edit things down. Slash and burn.

I'm frequently wordy. Expository. Loquacious. Garrulous. Voluble.

I don't know -- I like the way I write. I enjoy the process. I actually take pride (especially in my more topical pieces) in the way my pieces work through ideas and try to set things up. But more and more when I see the same words against a background other than this blue blogspot color scheme, the more I realize that the posts I write are simply too long for the web. Perhaps too much for magazine or newspaper standards as well.

I love that people check in on this site and read my stuff. Consider what I put down on the page. Comment and discuss.

But would my overall readership be wider if my entries were shorter?

The weird thing is, the stuff I post on here is edited down. The originals are usually a lot more scattered and loose. My former writing professor, mentor, and good friend Rick Straub was always a big proponent of what he would sometimes called the "splatter theory." We'd talk about writing and he'd always be like, "Just spill the paint all over the canvas. Go Jackson Pollock with your ideas on the first pass. But then when you're done take a good hard look at what's there and edit, edit, edit. Never ever hesitate to take a chainsaw to your own work."

"Good writers are great editors," he would always say.

I haven't thought about it in a while -- but back in the day Rick would get on me quite a bit for writing too much. He was always easygoing about it, but he'd go back to the point again and again.

Anyone who ever had Rick Straub as a teacher knows all too well what it was like to twist and turn your pages sideways to read the hand-written comments he would scrawl in the margins. Cryptic underlines, circles, and exclamation points.

And if you were really lucky, there would be a note at the end sort of summarizing his impressions of the piece.

It's weird, because in a lot of ways I'm a totally different writer than I was then. It was college. My ideas and themes were similar, but whenever I look back at pieces from those days I notice how much more unfocused and aggressive the pacing of my pieces would be. I still like a lot of the stuff I did in those days (I was a regular contributor to a locally published magazine as well), but it sometimes feels like I'm reading someone else's imitation of the writer I am now.

I remember Rick once telling me, "Part of the problem is that you're too attached to your jokes. And I hate saying that, because you're a funny guy. I laugh reading your stuff. But sometimes you waste energy and words setting them up. Everything you put on the page should add to your point. Anything that doesn't needs to get cut. It's your ideas that make your stuff worth reading. Focus on that."

I wonder what he'd think of my writing now, if he were still around to see it.

So many of my favorite authors are concise in their approach. Their work is filled with open spaces. Pauses in the music. There's room to think and consider the things they are talking about. In some ways I try to emulate that -- but it's almost like even when I'm hitting the right groove, I'm still playing much more than the song calls for.

Reminds me of my favorite Miles Davis story:

I don't really have any way to verify if this is true or not (although I believe that it is) -- but the story goes that one day Miles Davis was talking with John Coltrane, and he asked him why he tended to play so many notes on his saxophone whenever he played a solo. And after thinking about it for a moment, Coltrane answered,

"Whenever my solo comes up, I'm thinking about the mood of the song. The feel of the changes. And so when I start playing notes, I'm trying to explain what I'm feeling through the music. And as I'm building that idea I'll start getting other ideas, so I'll play those too -- and the next thing you know I've got all these musical ideas cascading down on top of each other. It's like a stream of consciousness that sometimes I don't really have any idea how to stop."
And after hearing all of this, Miles Davis looked back at Coltrane
and says, "Have you ever tried taking the horn out of your mouth?"
I don't know -- what do you guys think?

[Listening to: The Cure - "Other Voices" ]

Sunday Shred: A Birthday Surprise

2010-06-20T23:02:00.002-05:00

A while back my dear friend Beth hit me up on Formspring (during the week that I had it) and asked if I would come up with a song on guitar to play for her upcoming birthday. Seemed a simple enough request, one that I was happy to take on -- but then the challenge was to figure out what the best thing to come up with would be. Eventually though I came up with something I'm hoping she'll really like.

Apologies for the less than ideal sound quality, the guitar face, this video not being on YouTube (not much I could do about that, ~~Prince~~ Warner/BMG is a pain about people posting clips with their material in them) and especially for my little Rex Harrison-ish act there in the beginning. I'm not much of a singer, and I can't sing and play at the same time to save my life -- so I've largely saved everyone the pain of having to hear my crooning, but being that this was a special request I felt like I had to do a something, you know?

Enjoy!

[Listening to: The Time - "Cool" ]

Lillian Cannot Use the Phone

2010-06-19T23:55:00.005-05:00

A little somethin' somethin' for all the dads out there on this Father's Day.

Stick around for the ending, dads. Trust.

[Listening to: Deftones - "Needles and Pins" ]

The Friday Hot Sheet

2010-06-18T08:12:00.060-05:00

The world is a big place. The story used to be that in ancient times every four years the entire world would shut down to participate in the Olympic games. All conflicts, wars, or disputes of any kind would be suspended in deference to the games, so that the same warriors and statesmen who fought so passionately for their freedoms and ways of life would be able to go and compete for their nation's honor in in friendly competition against the rest of the world.

Of course when you dig a little deeper what you realize is that "the whole world" was actually just the seven city states and surrounding kingdoms around the capital city of Athens, Greece -- largely considered to be the heart of civilization and culture at the time.

So the fact that the World Cup soccer tournament is reported to have the attention of so much of the world's media (even if American popular interest is minimal at best) despite the oil spill in the gulf, growing tensions between Israel and Iran, and the national horror that is the Spaghetti-o's recall actually seems a lot more in line with how the world's sorta always been when you think about it.

The bad week you had -- the work stress, the ennui, the rising bills and the shrinking free time, in a lot of ways it's an island in a bigger storm. And yet, it's your island. We experience things first-hand, even though we're aware of events all around us.

Maybe that's why the world gets so tense sometimes.

Because in a lot of ways we are fully capable of creating our own problems and solutions, and yet we're still always being affected by things outside of ourselves, by the actions of other people -- whether they be selfless or manipulative.

I would love it if a soccer tournament or an Olympic festival or the NBA finals could snap everyone out of their collective fogs and bring us all together for a little while, but the simple truth is that as much as we might like those things to be unifying, the world is simply too large for that kind of unity to be forced through some sporting event.

Fortunately, we have the Internet. Sure it's loaded with porn, spam, and reactionary a-holes, but is there anyone anywhere in this whole big world who wasn't shocked, appalled, and yet strangely compelled to learn more about the baby who smokes cigarettes?

Seriously, what the hell?

That is why I'm suggesting that every four years we get a think tank of teenagers whacked out on energy drinks and prescription drugs to release a stupid meme every year that the entire world will stop and check out for a few minutes. Nations will come together to huddle around the computer screen of that one guy who never does any real work and forget their troubles for a few minutes. Wars will pause. Oil will stop flowing. Hatred will be forgotten and forgiven as well all take a second to remember our shared humanity on this tiny planet in a remote corner of the galaxy --

As we all come together and enjoy the brilliance that is Cat Rave.
So before a bunch of pussies with glow sticks bring world peace -- here are this week’s risers and fallers, and the buzz as it looks from here:

Hate
Mail How do you know if you've really made it as a writer? Is it when you get things published, or when an editor calls you back to do more work for them based off the interest in your previous work? As many of you might know, a rant I originally published on this blog about what I saw as a trend of hypocrisy in the vegan community was recently published in Folio Weekly magazine here in Jacksonville. I had to edit the story down quite a bit to fit their requirements, and the editors themselves made a few changes to the text (as editors will always do) -- but the spirit of the thing stayed largely intact. I got a handful of compliments and well wishes from friends and family (which was awesome), but it wasn't until this week that I truly got a sense for how many people actually read my story and were affected by it.

Because this week, there were not one -- but two angry letters to the editor of Folio Weekly deriding my story. That's right friends, Jacksonville vegans were pissed -- and they took to their emails to call me out on it. They called me uninformed, said my writing was rambling and pointless, and one guy even went as far as to say that my article was "A total waste of a Backpage."
It. Was. Awesome.
I've had work published in Folio before, and even had one or two complimentary letters to the editor show up in following issues -- but in all my years of getting stuff published (which is admittedly not as much as I would like to have) I've never garnered printed evidence that I actually pissed off the people I was attacking. I mean sure, I've had plenty of derisive commentary and heated discussions flare up in the comment sections of this blog (discussions and arguments that I thoroughly enjoy being a part of, btw) -- but there's something really cool about seeing unsolicited venom from strangers directed back at me -- especially when it's in the letters to the editor section, which Folio usually reserves for letting dissenting opinions ramble on in order to point out just how reactionary and easily agitated many people actually are, no matter how much they try to convince you that they're not.
The NBA Finals People ask me from time to time why I still bother with Twitter. What's the appeal? And while I don't deny that there are times when the micro-blogging social network can be a distraction, there are other times when it's the most fun you can have when you're supposed to be doing something else. They haven't come up with the right buzzword for it yet (thank god) but every now and then Twitter will sort of collectively get swept up in something and just become this nearly real-time snark fest of people sharing in an event -- enjoying it, making fun of it, breaking off into tangential side conversations about it -- all without the complication of their voices getting in the way of the actual event.

You know what it's really like -- Being at a presentation at work or a boring class at school and passing notes or cutting up with your friends in the back of the class. Expect instead of a classroom it's a worldwide stage, and instead of your buddies it's scores of people all around the world. Or like making jokes during a movie.

Maybe not everybody enjoys that sort of snark, but what I'm finding more and more is that I do -- and it makes a lot of things (especially television) ten times more fun than their supposed hype or the actual way that these events turn out to be.

Take Game 7 of this year's NBA finals -- which was a sloppy mess of a game filled with bad shooting, silly turnovers, and stupid fouls -- all of which probably wouldn't have held my attention much at all except for the last 15 minutes or so where Ron Artest and Kobe Bryant basically outran the much older and seemingly less focused Boston Celtics on their way to the championship. The game itself was a snoozer, especially for those of us who didn't really have a dog in the fight -- but Twitter was alive with cracks on the players, the ref's, and anything else that caught people's eyes and made then laugh.

It's kinda like being at a sports bar or a private viewing party with just your friends, cutting up and having a good time with it. I know it might sound weird, but it sort of makes the whole experience more personal, and at least for me -- a lot more fun.

Drawn Together You know what I really love, when you can tell people are really passionate about something and get to see them do it. That's why I love bands and artists that you can tell are totally pushing hard to make it.

This is also why I always get so annoyed at Hollywood studios, directors, and star actors that seemingly have no problem putting out the same half-assed tripe time and time again just because that's what people are used to them doing and having it somehow maintain their level of stardom or fame.

I mean seriously, just about the time you're starting to worry that it's just about time for another insipid family comedy full of bad cliche's and rehashed pop music soundtracks to come out from either Adam Sandler, Kevin James, or David Spade -- you come to find out that just they've all just thrown in the towel and teamed up for a film that enables them to basically collectively wank off together at some secluded location shoot with half a scripts worth of ideas for six weeks and then walk away with huge paychecks that will last them until they decide to do the sequel in a year so they can make room for Steve Carell and Tina Fey to get in on the money train.

So when you find something out there that actually gleams with the shine of love and fun from the people involved, it's hard not to get swept up into it.

I know a lot of people got their fill of Drawn Together when it was a poorly matched lead in for South Park during it's early glory days on Comedy Central. Let's be honest here -- compared to the fearless social commentary and gross-out power that Trey Parker and Matt Stone churned out week after week the sitcom-styled parody that was a reality show filled with stereotypical iconic cartoon characters stuck in a house together never really had a chance. It was like a little kid arm-wrestling Kimbo Slice.

But I loved it anyways, largely for the way it took shots at Hanna Barbera-era cartoon cliche's and contrived reality show dramas -- but also after a while because you started to realize that so many of the voice actors involved were the ones who were usually stuck doing much more tame and sterile kids characters having the chance to essentially cut loose to be as crass and rude as they could possibly be, and clearly having a blast doing it.

Then again, I'm fascinated by cartoon voice actors in general. Truth be told, it's a job I secretly would love to do. From what I can tell it's really all about who you know and sorta being in the right place at the right time (Tom Kenny -- the voice of Spongebob [and countless other characters] basically came to LA with his highschool buddy Bobcat Golthwait to see if they could make a name for themselves, and during the lean years took on cartoon voicework as a way to pay the bills. He's now one of the most sought-after voices in the industry).

So when you start to realize the collected cartoon character credits of Drawn Together regulars like eternal crush objects Cree Summer (oh Cree Summer -- the things I would do to you, and that's not even counting when I used to crush on you back when you were Freddie on A Different World) and Tara Strong (plus Adam Carolla, Jess Harnell, and James Arnold Taylor) -- who's names you might not recognize but if you've watched any amount of cartoons in the last 15 years you've heard more times than you probably even know -- make up half the cutesy kids and superheros and non-threatening Disney channel villains you or your kids grew up with -- the fact that they get to take on such subjects as racism, homophobia, deviant sexual appetites, and Christian cartoons starring computer-generated vegetables without having to be cute or kid-friendly about it starts to sound like a hell of a lot of fun.

Even though the original series was canceled years ago, a cult audience remains -- leading to the recent release of a Straight-to-DVD fan service sort of movie that I watched earlier this week. Was it the best thing ever? Nah, it was kinda silly and rude just for the sake of being silly and rude, just like all Drawn Together episodes tended to be -- but could you sorta see behind the animation and feel everyone having a great time playing around with the characters and being a part of a writing/directing/talent crew that clearly enjoys working together? Hell to the Yes.

Gamer On the recommendation of a dear friend, I gave this film a look recently. You probably remember the commercials -- Gerard Butler in a movie where his action hero character is being controlled by a cocky teenager playing some sort of video game? The bad guy was Dexter's Michael C. Hall? The advertising made it seem sort of cliche and lame, like just another shoot-em-up with sort of a "the future is scary" plot twist. But it's actually a lot more than that -- or at least it wants to be.

Directed by Neveldine/Taylor, Hollywood's latest wunderkind pair that gave us the cult favorite Crank Series starring Jason Statham and wrote the script for the recently released Jonah Hex (which looks awful) -- Gamer is actually about a lot more than just a video game using live human soldiers. It's one of those movies that the studio clearly didn't know how to market, and they just went with the easiest angle they could think of -- "Hey look -- It's the guy from 300, but this time he's got a machine gun! Pew! Pew Pew!!

In actuality, Gamer goes for a very interesting statement about the direction many people are heading in where immersible video games like World of Warcraft, The Sims, and even lesser online shared gaming experiences like XBox Live or the Playstation Network could create a world where many people would welcome outside control of their lives if it meant they could be who they were online instead of who they actually are. Certainly not a new idea -- but an interesting take on it (although it's arguable if they actually succeeded in pulling the whole thing off when all's said and done).

I'm not saying that this is a change your life kind of film (the eventual way the action story takes over the allegory to me sort of steals the thunder from the overall effect, and a lot of the characters are too cartoon-y for the audience to sympathize with) -- but I love the energy of it all, and the suggestive environments and ideas that appear throughout (if you're willing to go a level deeper than just the surface story) offer an interesting take on our online culture. It's almost like I found the backstory a hundred times more interesting than the actual plot (save for all the jokes about the kind of people who play games like The Sims, a ton of incidental nudity, a great gag involving a bottle of vodka and a car's gas tank, and the appearance of the always fun to see Terry Crews) -- even if it's only for the implications of it all and the conversations that it eventually sparked.

Much like the Crank movies (which were fun, but too scattered when everything was said and done to be considered really great) Gamer kinda tries to do too much too early, and then has to sort of choose one path to finish up with. But if you go into it with an open mind and don't mind all the friggin' jump cuts and camera tricks, there's a fascinating world in there to look at -- especially if you happen to be a bit of a videogame fan already.

Toy
Story 3 On the one hand -- I didn't really need someone to make a third Toy Story movie. I was happy to be done with that world when they finished the second one. I like the characters fine enough, and at the time the animation was astounding -- but when you first heard about them going back to the well one more time it seemed a little unnecessary.

Part of this is that the films in the Toy Story franchise were essentially were my son's first overload films. Oh my god did he watch the hell out of those movies. Over and over we'd watch it. We'd act out scenes from it. We'd buy him toys from it. At first it seemed harmless and fun, and like a lot of young parents -- we made the mistake of letting his enjoyment of it, which translated into sort of a mental rest time for each of us (or an ideal time to fold laundry, do dishes, etc.) -- become sort of a drug that we all abused. And yet, even after seeing it what seems like a billion times in a row, I've still got a lot of love for the whole Toy Story universe.

So chances are my son and I (it's our weekend together) will go out to see this at some point in the next few days. It's gotten almost nothing but positive reviews, and as he gets older and starts to see things with a more critical eye I find that I really do enjoy catching the occasional flick with the boy in the theaters (even if it does cost an arm and a leg).

At the same time, enough is enough Pixar. Let this one go. There used to be a time back in the day when people looked forward to Shrek movies coming out. Lets not poison this particular well with that same sort of thinking, ok?
Besides, Andy's gone off to college now and left his toys behind -- it's not like
you have a lot of storyline options available at this point anyways, ..right?

[Listening to: N*E*R*D - "Everyone Nose (All the Girls Standing in the Line for the Bathroom)" ]

The Final Countdown

2010-06-17T23:56:00.009-05:00

If you spend any time around my Twitter or Facebook, then you've probably noticed the messages counting down the days -- all leading to the celebration of my dear friend Beth's birfday.

Well the day is finally upon us, and apparently I'm the present.

Feel free to head on over to OHN to join in the fun and offer your own well wishes.

Be warned though, they've apparently got me signed up for some pretty crazy stuff, lol.
Lordy, Lordy -- look who's ..wait, what's this ish with the bows!?

[Listening to: Children of Bodom - "If You Want Peace, Prepare For War" ]

	Oversaturation	I sorta lost count after a while there -- but something like 50 more tapes of Mel Gibson screaming obscenities on the phone were released last week, the difference being that this time around nobody really gave a shit. Which is kind of weird, considering how hilarious this whole situation was the first time we heard about it. It's almost as if everybody sort of had an unconscious limit for the number of times we could hear Mel yell out the c-word, and he crossed it somewhere around the fifth phone call. Little did we know there were like 10 more of the things, and that Radar Online would do everything they could to make sure we had access to them all. It's one of the strange things about our voyeuristic society. We have an appetite for seeing people fall from their pedestals, especially when they reveal themselves to be something different from what we perhaps thought they were. And yet the one thing people grow weary of in a hurry is when two self-absorbed people feel the need to bicker in public. Which is not to say that Mel Gibson isn't some unbalanced racist nutjob, but this has been going on long enough for folks to realize that his Russian girlfriend spent like 2 months recording their conversations (which suggests that even if she were the victim of his temper -- that she in turn put extra effort into guiding conversations towards things she knew would just set his crazy ass off, and then conveniently hushing up so the microphone would pick up his rantings loud and clear). Now don't get it twisted -- I'm not trying to shift the blame or put the victim on trial here, but once something like this stretches into two weeks I'm sure I'm not the only one who suddenly felt like an involuntary marriage counselor who was stuck having to hear all of this played out in front of them. Plus, after the first round of games I think we all started to suspect what we had here were two people who like to argue, people who want the drama. At which point I think the majority of us just sorta backed out of the room, closed the door, and got on with our lives while those two peacocks continue to peck it out amongst themselves.

	Futurama	Netflix has several seasons of Futurama available for instant play, and after a long time of not seeing the show I decided to queue up an episode the other day while I was watching my son play video games. What started out as an attempt at interesting background noise turned into a full night of him and I catching up on a show we occasionally watched before bedtime when he was younger. I like The Simpsons, but was never really addicted to it the way a lot of other people I know were. As such, I initially didn't gravitate towards Futurama when it was on FOX. Then I discovered it on Adult Swim a few years later and fell utterly in love with the show. But as they frequently do, Adult Swim sorta ran Futurama into the ground with marathons and repeated episodes night after night. Still funny, but too much of the same thing over and over, you know? The new episodes on Comedy Central have been fun -- but what's been really neat for me is revisiting those old episodes now that my son is old enough to start getting more of the jokes. He's only 10, so a good bunch of it still flies over his head -- but we've really been getting into the slapstick parts together, which has led to a bunch of great father/son evenings recently. So many of the shows he likes (Ben 10, Bakugan, Flapjack, etc.) do nothing for me at all, and a huge majority of the things I like are things he really doesn't need to be seeing yet -- so it's nice to find something that offers us both a middleground.

	Obama on The View	Back in my time of being unemployed, daytime TV was an easy narcotic to fall prey to. Even when I was hyper-vigilant about submitting applications and resumes to places, it wasn't like I could force the phone to ring -- so there were lots of days where I would veg out at home catching up on old reruns, Sportscenter, or trashy talk shows. And yet, one thing I could never really get with was The View. I know it's aimed at a different audience and gender than I fit into -- but the few times I've seen it flipping channels it was really hard to see how that show ever became a hit. Seriously, everybody on there talks over everyone else. Not to mention the fact that it's frequently confusing as to what the hell they're even talking about in the first place. But worst of all, they never really seem to settle any of their own arguments. Who knows, maybe that's the point -- but any time I tried to check it out it gave me a headache just listening to those hens cluck at each other. As such, it was a little weird to hear that Obama was going on there -- and yet it was clearly a platform where he could reach out to a demographic that was a huge help to him during the election years and address a variety topics in a forum where for the most part he couldn't get too grilled. Not that they didn't try to ask him tough questions -- but that the format and time restrictions played in his favor a lot more than say a press conference or some open town hall meeting in the middle of nowhere filled with prospective Joe the Plumber's lying in wait. Unfortunately, the whole thing ended up being more of a media circus than anything else -- which John Stewart was quick to point out on The Daily Show later that night: Look, I realize that the man's not quite conquered all the dragons yet. And a lot of that is on him, his administration, and the way they choose to handle things. But I like that he's willing to get into forums like this and take the shots (such as they are). Of course he's still a politician -- so you have to take his answers with a certain grain of salt, but it's good to see him in a situation where he can feel somewhat at ease and still be faced with questions and concerns.

	Jersey Shore Season 2	If you're looking for someone to at least partially blame for the return of these overhyped Bennies, feel free to get mad at me. Even though I was fully aware of how ridiculous the whole thing was I watched anyway, enjoying the human train wreck for what it was -- especially considering that the first time it appeared was in the dead of a particularly long winter (even in Florida) -- which had the strange side effect of making coastal New Jersey seem like some tropical paradise by comparison. All of which makes me wonder how well Jersey Shore will fare this second time around -- especially given that most of the country is in now the throes of a brutally hot summer, meaning the on-screen antics won't have the benefit of seeming like somewhere we'd all like to be instead of shivering in the cold. This time around they're not even in New Jersey, but in South Beach Miami (Jersey was snowed under when the series was shot), which means the clubs they visit will be swankier, the a-holes and grenades around them more pretentious -- in short, it will be less of a show about morons bumbling though a boardwalk summer and more about quasi-celebrities partying in the playground of the rich and well-to-do. I'm still interested in this new season (it premiered last night but I haven't had a chance to watch my DVR recording of it) -- but a big part of the appeal the first time around was these vapid kids acting like the various spots they hit on the shore were the greatest places ever, only to have the camera zoom out to catch a scene wider than just the fist pumping guidos to reveal that the "exclusive club" they were all at was just some lazy boardwalk watering hole filled with half-asleep old guys and the kind of dudes who would punch a Snooki on cue. Anyone who's ever spent time at Panama City Beach or Daytona's old boardwalk before they cleaned it up knows exactly what I'm talking about here -- because that's really what the Jersey Shore is. The rich kids go to the Hamptons, and the rest of us get the crappy putt-putt course next to the T-Shirt shop. So those of you who are sick of Snooki, Paulie D, The Situation, and the rest shouldn't worry too much, because MTV (as usual) is messing with the formula, which rarely ends well. Lets just hope for the sake of entertainment that it goes out in a flaming spray-tanned ball of fury.

	Jane Austen’s Fight Club	Look, I want to like this video clip. I love Fight Club. I love old-school literary humor. I also really, really love it when hot chicks beat the crap out of one another. So on all those fronts, this clip wins with flying colors. But there’s a problem. See, there are just some things in this world that transcend basic comedy. That rise above all premise, character, and metaphor. Maybe it’s just me -- but when you ask someone to buy into something like this, it’s imperative that I believe it all the way through. That nothing comes between me and that fourth wall that would interrupt my suspension of disbelief to the point where I have trouble remembering what the original joke was supposed to be. And if there’s one thing in this world that I understand -- one rule that I absolutely know to be true: It’s that the white girl dance ruins everything.

	The World Cup	The US team pretty much had to get a win. But I suspect that even folks in this country who are rabid soccer fans quietly worried that once again they wouldn't be able to get one. It's the kind of tension that would usually make a sporting event a magnet for anticipation and coverage -- but would that same feeling hold true for a sport most of the country doesn't care about? It's sort of weird, because in a strange way it's almost as if the national annoyance over soccer in general somehow shifted into sort of a secret curiosity, perhaps spurred by vuvuzela hate and the way social sites like twitter tend to create buzz around events even if it's just for the snark factor -- people started tuning in. You'd catch it on the TV's in the breakroom at work, kind of on in the background with people absently looking on. It's still a deathly slow and boring sport to watch on television. But in an odd way, I think it's slow-as-molasses pacing actually helped things (at least on the east coast where I was), as the action in the game didn't really take off until almost lunchtime, where people sitting down in the office cafe or hanging out at local restaurants had a chance to see Landon Donovan snag that rebound and do what previous games featuring the American team had not been able to do -- create legitimate excitement. Does this win mean that the sport will finally get it's due in this country? No. Let's be honest here -- the Americans could make history and win this whole thing and the sport would still be forgotten and pushed aside once the NFL gets going again, but as far as a step in a good direction (or perhaps better said a step away from a death knell)? Not too shabby.

	Grown Ups	Ugh. The sooner this movie goes away the better -- but it's probably a safe bet we'll be dealing with it for a few more weeks despite all the crappy reviews. The big question is whether or not it will be able to knock off the success of Toy Story 3, which to no one's surprise has been going like crazy with kids and adults alike who've grown up with the franchise (I saw it with my son last week -- it's a sweet little film). At the same time -- I think that's part of what really bothers me about this obvious cash grab featuring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Chris Rock. With all these big names, you'd think they would be talented enough to put together a truly original funny movie that could take on a kids movie like Toy Story and put up a legitimate battle for a box office weekend -- but instead they held it back a week, where the returns will be a little easier to snipe at -- which to me clearly indicates that even the studio knows it's just another helping of the same crap we've grown used to seeing lately (I find it particularly telling that most of the scenes featured in the trailers and advertisements show the cast sitting down). As such, don't be surprised to see commercials next week proclaiming Grown Ups as "The Number 1 Comedy Movie in America" or some such kissing-your-sister type of tagline that attempts to drum up extra hype for the thing while sort of not admitting that Pixar still beat them out in it's second weekend. And you might be asking yourself -- "What's the big deal, why do you even care?" And the answer is simple -- after the success of Couples Retreat last year and the moderate returns of Gary Marshall's Valentines Day, the groundwork has been laid for more of these lazy ensemble-cast movies to come out. Sometimes you group talented people together and get good results, like Anchorman or The Hangover -- but most times a film like this is about creating a name product that people recognize and aren't afraid to see. In other words, Grown Ups only needs to be familiar enough for people to want to show up to see it to make money. When you think about it, a movie like this doesn't really have to be any good to be a success. Personally I would like to see more movies where Chris Rock gets to be more than a bit player. But if all he has to do every summer is wait for Sandler to call him up to be in the sequel to this and collect another $20 million for doing nothing, then where does that get us?

	True Blood	The HBO hillbilly vampire hit True Blood is back for it's third season -- and as much as I enjoy it's trashy humor, gratuitous nudity, and non-sparkly vampire violence goodness -- am I the only one who tuned into this season expecting to see more equal opportunity bawdiness only to notice that the veneer has finally been pulled away to reveal the fact that what I thought was a sassy little HBO show with blood and boobs is actually a show about hot guys talking to and/or killing other hot guys? It's always good to have a show you can share with people, especially when it's an HBO show that doesn't skew too hard one way or the other (like Sex in the City or Entourage tend to do) and for a while True Blood seemed to be that show. But at least for me the first two episodes of this new season have been leaning hard on scenes featuring dudes bare asses and Vampires named Bill enchanting guys named Hoyt to take a showers with them. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's still a fun show, but what I always perceived as a sexy balance to the storylines has at least in these early season episodes been sorta thrown away in favor of what seems to be an effort to try and lure away Twihards on the eve of their new movie hitting the screens.

	Podcasts	I'm not really sure what sparked my curiosity this week as opposed to others -- but I went on a podcast listening kick the last couple of days (although to be honest, now I kinda wish I hadn't). There have been a few podcasts I've heard in the past to varying returns, but not to the point where I was really addicted or disgusted in any sort of way. For example -- being a big fan of Adam Carolla's old radio show on KLSX, it was only natural to check out podcasts of previous episodes or show's that I'd missed for whatever reason (which translated into following his still-running podcast show to this day) And being a big movie nerd I tended to check out the Onion AV Club's regular Friday discussions whenever I wanted to hear about new movies coming out. But I never really got much deeper into that particular world, you know? I think a big part of the reason was that I don't really enjoy audio blogging. I'm a reader, I like seeing the written word. I like the thought process it invokes. The selected podcasts I did partake in were more like talk radio shows (another medium I like -- albeit in moderation). But this week during a particularly slow stretch at work where I guess the music choices on my iPod weren't doing much to inspire me I decided to check out a few podcasts I hadn't heard before -- including a sports discussion hosted on one of my favorite pro football sites, and a movie round table that's started up over at Filmdrunk. Both were horrid. Maybe it's because both podcasts seem relatively new (I could be wrong about that) and they haven't found their stride yet, or that there wasn't much interesting to talk about film-wise or sports-wise (even though I opened the sports podcast specifically because of a discussion they were having regarding the hometown Jacksonville Jaguars) -- but the results I found were more akin to a bunch of kids on headsets bantering about while playing Call of Duty rather than anything approaching a talk show or a guerrilla radio broadcast. The Jaguars discussion (a topic I'm planning on writing more about soon) was particularly awful -- as an assembled group of "professional sports bloggers" (ugh) interviewed a blogger dedicated to covering just one team (double ugh) in an effort to discuss the struggles of the team in recent years to sell tickets in a small market. Essentially it was three guys trying to make jokes from a national perspective while one local honk (who was breathing so heavily you could literally feel his fatness through your headphones) insisted that they didn't understand the uniqueness of the Jacksonville market and then tried (between bites of his ham sandwich, apparently) to explain every banal detail of the teams existence in this city over the last ten years. In a flash I realized just how fortunate I have been to come across the bloggers and radio hosts that I read and listen to on a regular basis -- because apparently there is a whole other side of things out there that just stinks out loud.

	YouTube Musicians	Speaking of would be stars taking up space on the Internet -- following the runaway success of Justin Bieber and ..that other kid, Brett over at the always awesome Viral Video Film School took some time to show us some of the other undiscovered musical talents on the web (especially the guitar guy at the top of the stairs in the warehouse working as hard as he possibly can to get those three lame pentatonic riffs to come out of his fingers and the karaoke mom) leading to the creation of this little compilation video, which makes me giggle every time I see it. Or at least it does until that last guy shows up with a carload of what!?

	Hate Mail	How do you know if you've really made it as a writer? Is it when you get things published, or when an editor calls you back to do more work for them based off the interest in your previous work? As many of you might know, a rant I originally published on this blog about what I saw as a trend of hypocrisy in the vegan community was recently published in Folio Weekly magazine here in Jacksonville. I had to edit the story down quite a bit to fit their requirements, and the editors themselves made a few changes to the text (as editors will always do) -- but the spirit of the thing stayed largely intact. I got a handful of compliments and well wishes from friends and family (which was awesome), but it wasn't until this week that I truly got a sense for how many people actually read my story and were affected by it. Because this week, there were not one -- but two angry letters to the editor of Folio Weekly deriding my story. That's right friends, Jacksonville vegans were pissed -- and they took to their emails to call me out on it. They called me uninformed, said my writing was rambling and pointless, and one guy even went as far as to say that my article was "A total waste of a Backpage." It. Was. Awesome. I've had work published in Folio before, and even had one or two complimentary letters to the editor show up in following issues -- but in all my years of getting stuff published (which is admittedly not as much as I would like to have) I've never garnered printed evidence that I actually pissed off the people I was attacking. I mean sure, I've had plenty of derisive commentary and heated discussions flare up in the comment sections of this blog (discussions and arguments that I thoroughly enjoy being a part of, btw) -- but there's something really cool about seeing unsolicited venom from strangers directed back at me -- especially when it's in the letters to the editor section, which Folio usually reserves for letting dissenting opinions ramble on in order to point out just how reactionary and easily agitated many people actually are, no matter how much they try to convince you that they're not.

	The NBA Finals	People ask me from time to time why I still bother with Twitter. What's the appeal? And while I don't deny that there are times when the micro-blogging social network can be a distraction, there are other times when it's the most fun you can have when you're supposed to be doing something else. They haven't come up with the right buzzword for it yet (thank god) but every now and then Twitter will sort of collectively get swept up in something and just become this nearly real-time snark fest of people sharing in an event -- enjoying it, making fun of it, breaking off into tangential side conversations about it -- all without the complication of their voices getting in the way of the actual event. You know what it's really like -- Being at a presentation at work or a boring class at school and passing notes or cutting up with your friends in the back of the class. Expect instead of a classroom it's a worldwide stage, and instead of your buddies it's scores of people all around the world. Or like making jokes during a movie. Maybe not everybody enjoys that sort of snark, but what I'm finding more and more is that I do -- and it makes a lot of things (especially television) ten times more fun than their supposed hype or the actual way that these events turn out to be. Take Game 7 of this year's NBA finals -- which was a sloppy mess of a game filled with bad shooting, silly turnovers, and stupid fouls -- all of which probably wouldn't have held my attention much at all except for the last 15 minutes or so where Ron Artest and Kobe Bryant basically outran the much older and seemingly less focused Boston Celtics on their way to the championship. The game itself was a snoozer, especially for those of us who didn't really have a dog in the fight -- but Twitter was alive with cracks on the players, the ref's, and anything else that caught people's eyes and made then laugh. It's kinda like being at a sports bar or a private viewing party with just your friends, cutting up and having a good time with it. I know it might sound weird, but it sort of makes the whole experience more personal, and at least for me -- a lot more fun.

	Drawn Together	You know what I really love, when you can tell people are really passionate about something and get to see them do it. That's why I love bands and artists that you can tell are totally pushing hard to make it. This is also why I always get so annoyed at Hollywood studios, directors, and star actors that seemingly have no problem putting out the same half-assed tripe time and time again just because that's what people are used to them doing and having it somehow maintain their level of stardom or fame. I mean seriously, just about the time you're starting to worry that it's just about time for another insipid family comedy full of bad cliche's and rehashed pop music soundtracks to come out from either Adam Sandler, Kevin James, or David Spade -- you come to find out that just they've all just thrown in the towel and teamed up for a film that enables them to basically collectively wank off together at some secluded location shoot with half a scripts worth of ideas for six weeks and then walk away with huge paychecks that will last them until they decide to do the sequel in a year so they can make room for Steve Carell and Tina Fey to get in on the money train. So when you find something out there that actually gleams with the shine of love and fun from the people involved, it's hard not to get swept up into it. I know a lot of people got their fill of Drawn Together when it was a poorly matched lead in for South Park during it's early glory days on Comedy Central. Let's be honest here -- compared to the fearless social commentary and gross-out power that Trey Parker and Matt Stone churned out week after week the sitcom-styled parody that was a reality show filled with stereotypical iconic cartoon characters stuck in a house together never really had a chance. It was like a little kid arm-wrestling Kimbo Slice. But I loved it anyways, largely for the way it took shots at Hanna Barbera-era cartoon cliche's and contrived reality show dramas -- but also after a while because you started to realize that so many of the voice actors involved were the ones who were usually stuck doing much more tame and sterile kids characters having the chance to essentially cut loose to be as crass and rude as they could possibly be, and clearly having a blast doing it. Then again, I'm fascinated by cartoon voice actors in general. Truth be told, it's a job I secretly would love to do. From what I can tell it's really all about who you know and sorta being in the right place at the right time (Tom Kenny -- the voice of Spongebob [and countless other characters] basically came to LA with his highschool buddy Bobcat Golthwait to see if they could make a name for themselves, and during the lean years took on cartoon voicework as a way to pay the bills. He's now one of the most sought-after voices in the industry). So when you start to realize the collected cartoon character credits of Drawn Together regulars like eternal crush objects Cree Summer (oh Cree Summer -- the things I would do to you, and that's not even counting when I used to crush on you back when you were Freddie on A Different World) and Tara Strong (plus Adam Carolla, Jess Harnell, and James Arnold Taylor) -- who's names you might not recognize but if you've watched any amount of cartoons in the last 15 years you've heard more times than you probably even know -- make up half the cutesy kids and superheros and non-threatening Disney channel villains you or your kids grew up with -- the fact that they get to take on such subjects as racism, homophobia, deviant sexual appetites, and Christian cartoons starring computer-generated vegetables without having to be cute or kid-friendly about it starts to sound like a hell of a lot of fun. Even though the original series was canceled years ago, a cult audience remains -- leading to the recent release of a Straight-to-DVD fan service sort of movie that I watched earlier this week. Was it the best thing ever? Nah, it was kinda silly and rude just for the sake of being silly and rude, just like all Drawn Together episodes tended to be -- but could you sorta see behind the animation and feel everyone having a great time playing around with the characters and being a part of a writing/directing/talent crew that clearly enjoys working together? Hell to the Yes.

	Gamer	On the recommendation of a dear friend, I gave this film a look recently. You probably remember the commercials -- Gerard Butler in a movie where his action hero character is being controlled by a cocky teenager playing some sort of video game? The bad guy was Dexter's Michael C. Hall? The advertising made it seem sort of cliche and lame, like just another shoot-em-up with sort of a "the future is scary" plot twist. But it's actually a lot more than that -- or at least it wants to be. Directed by Neveldine/Taylor, Hollywood's latest wunderkind pair that gave us the cult favorite Crank Series starring Jason Statham and wrote the script for the recently released Jonah Hex (which looks awful) -- Gamer is actually about a lot more than just a video game using live human soldiers. It's one of those movies that the studio clearly didn't know how to market, and they just went with the easiest angle they could think of -- "Hey look -- It's the guy from 300, but this time he's got a machine gun! Pew! Pew Pew!! In actuality, Gamer goes for a very interesting statement about the direction many people are heading in where immersible video games like World of Warcraft, The Sims, and even lesser online shared gaming experiences like XBox Live or the Playstation Network could create a world where many people would welcome outside control of their lives if it meant they could be who they were online instead of who they actually are. Certainly not a new idea -- but an interesting take on it (although it's arguable if they actually succeeded in pulling the whole thing off when all's said and done). I'm not saying that this is a change your life kind of film (the eventual way the action story takes over the allegory to me sort of steals the thunder from the overall effect, and a lot of the characters are too cartoon-y for the audience to sympathize with) -- but I love the energy of it all, and the suggestive environments and ideas that appear throughout (if you're willing to go a level deeper than just the surface story) offer an interesting take on our online culture. It's almost like I found the backstory a hundred times more interesting than the actual plot (save for all the jokes about the kind of people who play games like The Sims, a ton of incidental nudity, a great gag involving a bottle of vodka and a car's gas tank, and the appearance of the always fun to see Terry Crews) -- even if it's only for the implications of it all and the conversations that it eventually sparked. Much like the Crank movies (which were fun, but too scattered when everything was said and done to be considered really great) Gamer kinda tries to do too much too early, and then has to sort of choose one path to finish up with. But if you go into it with an open mind and don't mind all the friggin' jump cuts and camera tricks, there's a fascinating world in there to look at -- especially if you happen to be a bit of a videogame fan already.

	Toy Story 3	On the one hand -- I didn't really need someone to make a third Toy Story movie. I was happy to be done with that world when they finished the second one. I like the characters fine enough, and at the time the animation was astounding -- but when you first heard about them going back to the well one more time it seemed a little unnecessary. Part of this is that the films in the Toy Story franchise were essentially were my son's first overload films. Oh my god did he watch the hell out of those movies. Over and over we'd watch it. We'd act out scenes from it. We'd buy him toys from it. At first it seemed harmless and fun, and like a lot of young parents -- we made the mistake of letting his enjoyment of it, which translated into sort of a mental rest time for each of us (or an ideal time to fold laundry, do dishes, etc.) -- become sort of a drug that we all abused. And yet, even after seeing it what seems like a billion times in a row, I've still got a lot of love for the whole Toy Story universe. So chances are my son and I (it's our weekend together) will go out to see this at some point in the next few days. It's gotten almost nothing but positive reviews, and as he gets older and starts to see things with a more critical eye I find that I really do enjoy catching the occasional flick with the boy in the theaters (even if it does cost an arm and a leg). At the same time, enough is enough Pixar. Let this one go. There used to be a time back in the day when people looked forward to Shrek movies coming out. Lets not poison this particular well with that same sort of thinking, ok? Besides, Andy's gone off to college now and left his toys behind -- it's not like you have a lot of storyline options available at this point anyways, ..right?

	The State of the Union	So, how are things with me? Eh, they're getting there. Money is an issue, which is more my fault than anyone's -- but finding a solution to it has proven really, really frustrating (hello acid reflux, didn't think you were coming back). But I've met some really awesome people in the past few months, and despite dark clouds here and there -- there are some very cool things I'm hoping to get to in the next few months. I'm registered to be in the River Run again for the first time in several years, and as my writing gets more active, I'm hoping to spread it around a little more and possibly try to make a few shekels with it too. Nothing written in stone yet, but lets see what develops.

	Mohr Stories	Like a lot of you out there these days, I spend a good part of my weekly headphone time with podcasts as well as music. One that I've started to really dig into and enjoy the most this week has been Jay Mohr's Mohr Stories. I've always been wishy-washy about Mohr, because I've always liked his comedy -- but then he does a guest host slot on Jim Rome's show and I start to think he's sort of an douche. But his podcast lives somewhere between those two poles, as he interviews comedians and friends about the industry -- and frequently veers off on tangents filled with movie quotes and impressions. His wife, actress and super crush object Nikki Cox [pictured] is usually around too, and although I hate him for marrying her away from me (even if she didn't know it) there's something in the way they banter off each other that I really like. It's like having dinner with a couple that really loves each other and coming away from it not wanting to utterly puke your guts out because all they could do was make goo-goo eyes at each other. The other thing about Mohr that I enjoy (especially in podcast form) is how he genuinely enjoys laughing at even the smallest, silliest things -- which a lot of comedians don't always do. If you like comedy-based podcasts, but maybe need a different flavor than Marc Maron's self-depreciation, I'd highly suggest giving this one a try (hint: start with the Patrice O'Neal episode -- great stuff).

	The Iowa Caucuses, etc.	There's a point of saturation with political crap, especially in this world of 24-hour news cycles and re-tweeted opinions. Frankly I was sort of sick of all the republican hopefuls and their seeming lack of focused ideology by the zillionth debate in a row, but as we get closer and closer to the real thing, it's hard to look away. It's no secret people are fed up with the way the economy is and that most of them place their blame with Obama, but do they really think any of these candidates are going to be the ones to knock him off? The issues seem muddled, like no one really knows what to say or how hard to commit to anything too far lest it become a rope to hang themselves with (koff koff Herman Cain koff). Honestly, standing on the other side of the fence as I mostly am -- none of these people seem like the real bad guy in this movie plot. Like they're the henchmen, and Cobra Commander is going to show up in the 3rd act and say "Vote for me!" The good part about that I suppose is that my guy (at least for now) seems like he has a clear shot at re-election. But like Don Cheadle said in tweeted response to criticism he got for wishing Obama was more "gangsta" as a president -- I think a lot of people felt let down by Obama's seeming lack of definitive policy moves. And to be honest -- my worry is that if he gets in a cakewalk election against a Ron Paul or a Rick Perry, where is Barack going to feel the motivation to do anything different? Politicians (and Obama certainly is one) rarely change their course without sufficient cause, and I think a lot of us are hoping that Obama has to fight like hell for re-election, and in doing so will get the fire back in his belly that we were hoping he'd have from the start.

	Sevendust	One of my absolute favorite bands, the Atlanta rockers played a packed house concert the night before New Years Eve in Jacksonville (for almost the last decade they've hosted a NYE concert in Orlando at the House of Blues), and it was incredible. Some bands just understand how to bring it live, even when the bigger show is right around the corner or there's other things going on in their lives (one of their crew members had committed suicide a few days before the show -- they dedicated a song to him, but never let up their intensity despite that tragic news). I hadn't been in a mosh pit in a while, hadn't been in a superloud concert in a while -- and the combination of the two had me giddy in a way that reminded me that good times happen when you get out and go to them. Too much of the past year has been spent in the same places waiting for the excitement to show up there, and surprise surprise -- it rarely if ever happened.

	The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo	I saw this during Christmas break, and it's sort of old news now -- but I haven't had much chance to talk about it. Unfortunately, most of my criticism of the film is too spoiler-y to share here without ruining it for anyone who hasn't seen it, but I was surprised at how much the movie didn't make me forget the original Swedish film. The Fincher version has a fantastic look, and if you haven't seen the Swedish version or you know nothing about the series definitely see it, but what I came away with most was a feeling that I'd already seen all of this before (like almost too exactly close to the other version) for me to feel any differently about it. The real difference of course was the actress playing the titular Lisbeth Salander character, and while I thought Rooney Mara did a fantastic job, she played the character as eventually more vulnerable than Noomi Rapace did, which made some of the key moments seem less.. powerful than they did the first time I saw it done. Still a good movie, but not in any way the game changer they tried to make it out to be.

	Shit [insert name of group here] Say	One of the things that made me originally stray away from doing the Hot Sheet (full confession time here) was that it was hard to find cool things during the week that everyone hadn't already seen by Friday. Sometimes it's unavoidable, especially with how fast the web moves -- but I like for the things I write about to at least have a little fresh snap to them (hence the blog post I did about Kim Kardashian earlier this week). With that in mind it seemed like a bad idea to post any of the "Shit Girls Say" "Shit Black Guys Say" "Shit Gay Guys Say" "Shit White Girls Say (to Black Girls)" [which might be the best one yet, btw] -- since they went viral over the past week or two. If you haven't seen them, definitely Google them now -- but then come back here, because I've got the best one yet riiiiight here.

	The San Diego Comic Con	Sometimes the Internet offers people a chance to connect to events and other people thousands of miles away, whether it's through social networking sites or mutual interest in a viral video or whatever. But sometimes the web focuses on things you're not at. Things you can't share. Every year in San Diego there's a comic book convention. Its more than just comics of course, but once upon a time it was sort of a closely guarded secret spot for nerds, anime fans, and movie geeks. Then it sort of became a cool thing for celebs to crash, and now it's just become a self-congratulatory Hollywood wank fest. But more than that -- it's a magnet for bloggers of almost all varieties to go and either celebrate their fandom or make fun of the people there. And boy do they rub it in. People I know who've gone before rave about it, but they also do that "it used to be cool, but then it sold out. I shan't be returning." And while I'm sure they're right (these are trusted friends, after all) it doesn't diminish the fact that I really wanted to go. I thought about it for many years (Gristina lives there and used to go annually) but I simply couldn't afford the trip. I'd still like to go to it at some point -- not because it seems like everyone else is there and I'm worried I'm missing out on something, but because it looks like a really great time for an anime/comic book/film geek like me. It's just sort of weird the way almost all the blogs and news sites I frequent are reporting from the con this week. So literally all my regular news and stuff is being filtered through updates about girls in Slave Leia costumes and news about Joss Whedon directing the new Avengers movie. "Nyah, Nyah -- I stood in line for two hours to see a table filled with people who worked on Lost, what did you do today?" I read about you doing it, thanks.

	Inception	I know I've already gushed about this on Twitter and to anyone willing (or unwilling) to listen to me rave on about it for the last week or so -- but it really is an entertaining movie. Not only for the interesting storyline and all the special effects, but for the thoughts it provokes and the conversations it leads to after you see it. Sometimes the best part of watching a movie (or enjoying any form of art, for that matter) is letting it sink in and considering it afterward. As such, I've been really happy about the way Inception has sat in my mind this past week, letting me consider ideas and sort of work through some of the things the film leaves open to interpretation. It's sorta like a Rubik's cube that you can pick up and play with now and again. But let me ask this of the people who have already seen it. How are you sleeping? I'm finding that although I haven't had any really wacky dreams (that I can recall) since watching the movie, I'm sorta hyper-aware of waking up lately. Like I'll open my eyes and sit up, but then I'm taking more stock of my surroundings than I usually do. Kinda like the way I didn't like showers after seeing Psycho or hated answering the phone after The Ring. I haven't invested in a totem just yet, but it's sorta weird that I keep waking up wondering which level I'm on.

	Sleepovers	This weekend (tonight, in fact) my son will be hosting his first sleepover with one of his friends from daycare -- which really means that I will be hosting my first kid that's not mine sleeping in my apartment tonight. Curren's super jacked up about it, and it should be a good time, but if this kid is anything like my son is -- I've got some serious house cleaning to do. A few months ago he stayed over at another kids house, and the next day my son basically ratted out every detail of their place to me. 10 year-olds don't really get the concept of discretion, so it's not like it's mean-spirited -- but I distinctly remember listening to him telling me how messy their bathroom was and instantly realizing that if we ever had this kid over to my place the same thing was going to happen to me. I'm a single guy living alone with a fast Internet connection. There's a high amount of ~~porn~~ stuff in this place that I'm pretty sure this kid's parent's don't want to know about. I can just see Curren coming back from daycare next week telling me that he can't play with his friend anymore. Talk about embarrassing.

	Salt	I know Angelina Jolie's a mega-star and all and her name is usually enough of a draw to get people in the door, but does anyone else find it weird how sort of quietly this movies marketing has been? I mean, I've seen trailers and I've heard about it -- but unlike a lot of other films this summer, I don't feel particularly bashed over the head with hype about Salt, and it makes me wonder why? Apparently the movie was originally a vehicle for Tom Cruise -- who's movie choices lately make Mel Gibson seem rational (did you hear they're building an entire movie around the agent character he played in Tropic Thunder, the same guy he trotted out at the MTV movie awards? Hey Tom, it was a funny character -- but maybe ask Paul Reubens how much fun it is to be stuck in a franchise that's been built around one joke, eh?). I don't really know why Cruise backed out of it, but for them to re-write the thing around Jolie seems pretty intriguing. She's good at stunt driven movies, she's actually a half-decent actress, and still even after all the hype and press one of the hottest women in Hollywood -- so I'm interested in seeing it, even if I have my doubts about the story. I mean lets face it, the only good part of Wanted was Morgan Freeman saying "Shoot this motherfucker." The rest of that movie stank out loud. This one at least looks like it's got potential, so maybe she can get back in the swing of making films people actually want to watch, instead of movies that are only good for screencaps.

	The Social Network	On the other hand, the movie who's advertising I can't seem to get away from is David Fincher's latest -- which tells the story of the beginning days and struggles of the guys who created Facebook. And wow does it look super fucking boring. Sure you've got some kids choir singing Radiohead and Justin Timberlake doing his slimy shark-suit best as the apparent villain, but let me see if I've got this straight for a second -- this is like a two-hour movie where one rich white kid takes another rich white kid to court to see who gets to keep ownership of Facebook and therefore become even richer? Well hell, where do I sign up for that all night party of fun? I understand it's probably a compelling story and of course relevant to the Internet generation, but movies about corporate lawsuits regardless of who is directing them are perpetually dour, which makes me wonder why it's getting such a marketing push. Is there like some zombie/sparkly vampire subplot in the middle that I'm somehow unaware of? Does Justin Timberlake transform into a car somewhere in the story and try to kill Megan Fox? Because otherwise, Radiohead or no -- I'll pass.

	The Dildo Knight	Unlike Andrew Breitbart, FOX News, and apparently the American Government -- I do my best to fact-check stuff before posting it on this site. I may not always have the best grasp of the possessive case or the correct use of semicolons -- but I've at least heard of Wikipedia and know how to access it. Unfortunately, as much as I tried to find out what the heck was going on in this video clip -- there's surprisingly little information available out there about the reasoning behind this mano e' mano throwdown between this guy in the tinfoil suit of armor swinging around a whip and his opponent, who appears to be armed with nothing more than an oversized sex toy -- which is really sort of odd, since that's the sort of thing the internet was kinda built around. Whatever the case, this exists -- and some guy who wasn't busy filming courtroom scenes for the Facebook movie caught it all on tape. Whip dude versus Dildo guy (which sounds like it ought to be a whole lot sexier) going all Thunderdome for your entertainment. Take it away, gentlemen!

	Mel Gibson	Holy crap. Have any of us had even half as bad a week as this guy has? Anybody notice how good Tiger is playing at the British Open (Don't even try to tell me those things aren't connected)? Day after day more tapes of the Road Warrior going batshit crazy -- recorded in perfect crystal clear "you just messed with the wrong woman" audio by his Russian girlfriend who is either looking to make him to confess to hitting her or find some way to prove that she isn't just making up her claims that he's a hateful, angry, unbalanced maniac who's got her scared for her and her child's life. Either way -- it's hard not to be somehow morbidly fascinated by it all (and the cute kitten recaps of the wackadoo quotes that keep coming out), even if it's just for the fact that there's just so much insane venom being revealed day after day. Seriously, who knew the guy was this far gone?

	Inception	I know I gushed about this in the opening paragraphs, but this is honestly the only movie I've been looking forward to in what has been a pretty lame summer season. Christopher Nolan's follow up to The Dark Knight features what appears to be a uniquely complex plot about people infiltrating and affecting the dreams of others matched with the kind of special effects that people want to see. And I don't say that lightly -- we've had movies come out this summer where characters could bend fire, movies where a child is able to do one-legged flip kick seemingly eight feet into the air, and a film where a bunch of dudes attempt to fly a tank. Essentially we're living in a computer-aided film age where just about anything you want to see is possible, and yet to have a trailer get you excited about an entire city folding over on itself is (at least for me) is pretty cool. The odd thing is that here's a film that clearly announces itself as smart, or at the very least multi-layered -- which is a huge part of why I want to see it, and yet clearly it's got an action movie hiding inside of it (which considering Nolan's other work I'm pretty excited about too). In fact, my only real worry about this film is that much like The Matrix it will spur the growth of a super-annoying Twilight/Avatar style fanbase who try to make it out to be much more than it is. To be perfectly honest, It's almost as if my real worry is that all the dummies who keep Adam Sandler rich will love this to the point where saying you like it too will rope you into conversations you'd normally avoid. Like I'd really prefer it if this was more my movie when I know (much like the Dark Knight) it will become a popular favorite. I'm not really 100% why that thought bothers me so much, but I suspect it comes from a feeling where I'd rather not be one of the masses when it comes to something like this -- and yet if it does take off and become the huge hit everyone expects it to be, how could you avoid it?

	Maid Droid	Maid Droid is the story of a future where android technology has progressed to the point where people can purchase pretty girl shaped maid robots to clean around the house and look after their children while they're at work. One family does this, but die soon afterward in an accident, leaving the child in the care of the robot hottie. He eventually (of course) falls in love with it, and a large part of the remaining story deals with their struggles to make those feelings real. Of course many people buy the maid droids simply to have sex with them -- which requires an upgrade (suggesting the Droids are made by ..Apple?) But for whatever reason this doesn't work for the protagonists -- but the man believes that he loves the robot, so they stay together regardless. Then while all of this is happening the remains of the original android experiment -- robot pets (which were all recalled and thrown away) somehow congeal together to form one giant robot dog, which stalks the streets of Tokyo late at night and basically rapes unsuspecting women. Then a puppet (who is 10 times creepier than the rape dog) tries to convince us that the women like it, because that's what women really want anyways. Add in a third story about a police detective trying to stop the rape machine (as it's known) and what you have is this odd kind of retelling of the Pinocchio story from three different angles -- except this time there's animal rape and a sixty-year old man trying to get freaky with a 20 year-old girl who's pretending to be a robot. If this all sounds kinda creepy and pervy -- well, that's because it is. There's a lot of despicable stuff in this flick. And yet, somehow there's this sweetness to the story. I mean, you sort of have to get past the robot rape dog part to see it, but it's there. I mean, lets not lie -- this is borderline porn (depending on your sensibilities), but it's sorta weird how a day or so after seeing this I'm sorta touched by just how much heart this dirty old man fantasy movie ended up having. I don't know -- the more Asian cinema I take in (which is admittedly not tons) the more I'm surprised by what I get out of it. It makes me think I might not have even sat through this whole film a few years back. Still, it's an interesting and bizarre movie -- almost in an Ichi the Killer/Oldboy sort of vein -- just with more weird sex than blood and gore. Not sure I'd recommend it to everyone, but I'm kinda glad I watched it, even if it was just for the experience.

	Despicable Me	I had problems with my internet last week, so I wasn't able to do a Hot Sheet -- but I did want to mention this. Despicable Me is a funny movie. My son is still doing the Steve Carell villain voice -- so if you've got kids and haven't seen it yet definitely check it out. But be warned, despite some sweet moments and memorable scenes -- I found myself kinda bored during a lot of it. If you're on the fence about this as a date flick or something to catch because you like cartoons I might suggest waiting for a rental. It leans on the cute button waaaay too much, which is part of it's charm -- but it does so in a way that feels artificial, like "Here comes the little girl character to do her cute thing again -- prepare for FLUFFY!!" Don't get me wrong, it's a fun ride for what it is -- but it's maybe not as astounding as people are making it out to be. I mean let's face it, this has been a pretty lame summer movie-wise. So in that respect, yeah -- Despicable Me was a billion times better than the last Shrek movie. But consider what that really means, you know?

	Making Money	My boys in Vendetta Nation have been working hard lately, gearing up for a regional tour, promoting their upcoming album, and getting the video for their first single finished. It's always weird seeing your friends in things like this (not to mention the fact that a good half of this was shot at Endo) -- but I really dig this song, so I thought I'd pass it on to you. See what you think!

	The iPhone	Word is starting to circulate that Verizon (my network) will start selling and supporting the iPhone sometime next January. Of course that's a long way off, and as those of us who waited for the Verizon Android phones to come out (or sat at home patiently waiting for Apple to let them have their upgrade) know all too well -- in cel phone land, a promise with a date on it is worth about as much as the promise of a flash-enabled operating system. But this development adds an odd little wrinkle to things. Despite recent bad press about problems with the iPhone 4 (first releases are always a little buggy, I suppose), it's still the most fully realized experience of all the smartphones out there. I adore my Droid -- but one of the reasons I went for it was that I wanted the same kind of access and functionality my iPhone friends had without having to kneel over and take it from AT&T again like I did back when they were my carrier (long story). And while I think the Android system is an adequate rival and could maybe one day even overtake Apples design -- right now it's a clear second place runner. That's to say nothing of the fact that every fix or advance to the Android system seems to be released as part of a different phone, and not just an update that everyone has to wait for with baited breath the way all my iPhone friends had been the past few weeks. Come January the full picture will probably be a lot clearer, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only Android user who's ears pricked up when that announcement started circulating. Who knows, I might have to make a tough decision about all this in the upcoming winter?

	The Last Airbender	Wow -- read any bad reviews lately? I know a couple of people who have seen The Last Airbender (all of whom so far have hated it, btw -- one guy even said "I don't want to talk about it, that's how mad I am"). Granted, there's a lot of reasons to dislike this film. If the complaints of the national critics are to be believed -- the 3D is terrible (apparently you can watch most of the film with your 3D glasses off), the story is incomprehensible, the child actors are wooden and unappealing, all of the Asian characters from the original animated series have all been recast using American and European actors (read: white people), the fight scenes don't actually involve any physical contact (the combatants all do these jazz hand moves that propel different elements like fire, water, wind, and dirt at each other) and that guy from The Daily Show isn't even funny in it. Which begs the question -- How much more is it going to take before people finally admit that despite The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan is a talentless hack? Seriously, how many more bombs does this guy have to drop? It's one thing to put out adolescent-minded garbage in the name of selling toys. But it's quite another to just ride on name recognition (not only his, but of the goodwill that people feel for what is a really good and frequently overlooked animated show) as an excuse to put out crappy work. And that's what his last few movies have really felt like. Lady in the Water was a mess. And don't even get me started on The Happening. My son has been asking to see it based off the commercials and the marketing, and I've been doing almost everything I can to talk him out of it. And I'm the guy who sat through both Chipmunk movies in the theater for him.

	Chocolate	Maybe one of the reasons these crappy huge budget studio pictures annoy me is that they make it easy to miss out on other stuff. Like this fantastic little Thai martial arts/action film directed by Prachya Pinkaew. I'm still relatively new to the particular style and pacing movies from Thailand bring with them, and like I've said in the past -- I can't even be sure that the action films I've seen are a good representation of what that country's cinema has to offer as a whole, but man did I get engrossed in this film. The odd thing about it is that if it were an American studio movie (or worse if Hollywood ever tried to remake it) Chocolate would be the sort of thing I would avoid like the plague, mainly because of the way Hollywood tends to overblow what on the surface seems like cliche elements in the plot. Basically, it's the story of an autistic girl who discovers that she can mimic actions and mannerisms (including varied martial arts fighting styles) simply by watching them -- and her struggle to help pay for her ailing mother's hospital and medicine bills by trying to collect money she is owed by local businessmen -- Which when you read it over probably puts all sorts of bad Julia Roberts/Jessica Alba type images into your head, but do all you can to erase those preconceptions -- because there's a lot more at work here. All of this is wrapped up in an organized crime story steeped with racial tensions and deep-seated cultural attitudes about the disabled. Eventually it boils down into an action-heavy ending, but not until it's emotionally wrapped you up in the main characters stories first. It's also got a very dry, very subtle sense of humor -- and a Kill Bill-type action sequence that builds into one of the coolest side fights since The Bride went one-on-one with Gogo -- where literally one autistic character takes on another one, which could have ended up being some sort of tasteless South Park gag, but instead has you on the edge of your seat wanting to see what's going to happen next. The only thing that still sits weird with me (and I'm still not really sure why) is the appearance of transvestites and cross-dressers as villains. As I've discussed on this page before, it's apparently a pretty normal thing in Thai cinema -- but it's still sort of jarring for my admittedly Western sensibilities to have a bunch of drag queens with guns show up in the middle of things when you're not expecting them. Btw -- for an added bonus, hand around for the credits, where they do the Jackie Chan trick of showing the accident reel where fight scenes go wrong. To see some of these stunts and battles in the movie is jaw-dropping enough, but to realize just how risky they actually were adds a completely different dimension to it all.

	$750 Million	No one's gonna stand here and tell you that Tiger Woods wasn't a jackass and didn't get what he deserved for the actions he decided to take. He disrespected his own legacy, betrayed his marriage, and embarrassed his wife and family. But man -- $750 Million is a lot of fucking money. I know I couldn't have been the only one who winced when I first saw that figure (I know reports are now saying that the actual payout is closer to $100 million, but even so -- that initial number had to come from somewhere, right?). The press on the matter says the main part of the deal that came with this huge payout is that Tiger's former wife can't go to the press, or write a book, or talk about the scandal in any way. That in addition to being a nest egg to support the children with and a financial penalty for betraying the vows of his marriage -- it's also essentially some sort of hush-money payoff for her agreed silence as he tries to rebuild his shattered public image. I suppose we could sit here all day and argue the monetary amount, the settlement, the audacity of his actions, or the trials and tribulations of the spouses of the rich and famous -- but really all of that has been beaten to death in the tabloids and on the news. What I'm more curious about now is Elin Nordegren. Tiger will go back to playing golf. He'll be the butt of a bunch of jokes for a while until he eventually starts winning tournaments again and then -- like it or not, eventually it will wash off of him the way it did for Kobe Bryant. But what about her? What exactly does one do when you're still pissed off, still sort of the victim in all this, and now in possession of several hundred million dollars of F-U money? I think it's a pretty safe bet to assume that she's not gonna run off to New York and start dating A-Rod. Can't really see her getting on Facebook and looking up Roger Clemens, Al Gore, Jesse James, or Ben Rothlisberger either, you know? So what is she gonna do -- Go all Anna Nicole Smith on us? Balloon up ten sizes, crack out, and start showing up in diet pill commercials and Kanye West videos? What little we know of her private nature from the news suggests that probably won't be the case, but it is a possible outcome (in that purely mathematical sense kinda like the possibility that she'll start calling my phone tomorrow -- not that I would really mind that, Elin). But lets face it, no matter who you are or where you're from -- suddenly getting a hold of $750 million has got to change your perspective on the world a little bit. I mean yeah, there was a real-life drama here at one point, but am I the only one who is seeing the beginning seeds of an epic science-fiction/comic book plot here? A bitter mother with young children -- secured in some remote Swedish mountaintop hideaway concealed from the world press, insulated by more money than some governments will ever see -- seething, training, growing stronger, developing a deep seated animosity for guys in red polo shirts and black baseball hats.. Some sort of academy for golf-hating supervillains who's only Kryptonite is Gatorade Fierce? I'm telling you, there's one heck of a movie hiding in all of this (as long as they don't let M. Night Shyamalan direct it).

	Milkshake	You know what? Keep all your super-hot shirtless Eurotrash World Cup guys. Your hunky firemen and creole-accented co-stars from True Blood. You can have Twilight. Keep all those moping sparkly vampires and shape-shifting werewolf llama boys to yourself. These things come and these things go. They're all just another fad like boy bands and pro wrestling. Sure it might bring all the girls to the yard now -- but when those girls grow up to be real women, what is it that they really want? That's right baby, a dude with a guitar.