Good News

Got out of surgery
Didn't die in sleep
Feeling better
My tummy hurts a little.

The Netflix Experience- My first movie post.

The Netflix Experience- My first movie post.

I've decided to document, (mostly for myself, because I can't see how anyone would care) how I enjoy my netflix cue over the next few months. You know Netflix(see sidebar link) the most amazing movie service since sliced-bread (sorry for the mixed cliche'). If you don't it's an internet service that allows you to go online and rent movies and have them mailed to your house. This service is great, because all I have to do is go online for two seconds when I remember a movie I've been wanting to rent, and add it to my cue. It takes like two days for it to get there, (does this sound like a commercial yet) and you can keep them as long as you want. No late fees! (now it does!) Anyway, I love it, and I currently have 80 movies in my cue. Sometimes I get a little click happy.
You can find almost anything on it though, from old school classics, (try finding "Lost Horizon" in Hollywood's 3 foot wide "classics" section, it's not at my local store at least), or TV on DVD, (ie the first three seasons of Strangers With Candy). I'm an avid purchaser of DVD's, but you gotta date before you marry, (plus I'm running out of shelf space, and some of my friends have labeled me "a nerd"...well duh!). As a practicing unrealistic, (screenwriter,director) I have to get creative inspiration wherever I can, so I'm going to write how I liked each movie and whether or not I drew any inspiration from it, or whether it just flat out sucked. Here is the list of some of the movies in my cue:

Strangers with Candy Season 1

"Upright Citizens Brigade Season 1"
My friends tell me these are good. I've seen some UCB and thought it was outright hilarious. I'm sure my friends wouldn't lead me astray, though they have a few times in the past. Man on Fire was violent for no good reason, and boring Darren.

"In the Mouth of Madness"
I can honestly say I love horror movies, which is weird, because I hate gore(both of them...) but something about the mystery of the unknown or the claustrophobia of most of these films keeps my interest. I'm not a big fan of crappy cheap ones like Friday the 13th. I like other cheap ones, that are classics, (Night of the Living Dead). As long as it's done well, a horror movie, or a good thriller can capture my attention faster than anything.
If I remember right, someone told me this was creepy, and the netflix synopsis sounds really interesting, but I am very afraid of the Clive Barker connection. Some of his stuff reeks! I thought Candyman was alright though, so I'll give him one more chance.

The Fog
I think I heard that parts of it were cheesy, but I choose to judge for myself. I kind of wish I hadn't read the synopsis, because it looked cool and the synopsis sounds a tad lame. I really wanted to see this though, because the trailer for the upcoming remake is really cool. I may get horror purists, (lucky I'm not friends with any in real life) to hate me, but I think a lot of the classic horror remakes lately have been cool. Dawn of the Dead, TCM. I thought they brought a cool aesthetic to already classic storylines. Wasn't so much a fan of Van Helsing. Shock me! Shock me! Shock me!

The Haunting-The Original
I heard this is a classic, because it doesn't need a lot of crazy special effects and images of ghosts to scare you, it scares you with the idea of what is there that you can't see. Less is more. Looking forward to it. Speaking of remakes, didn't love the new Haunting.

"What a Maroon!"

So I'm going into surgery tomorrow, (which reminds me I better call the doctor to see if we're still on). It's not major surgery. I won't say what it's for, but let's just say that "team lifting" is more than just a novel concept.

I've had surgery before, but never "torso surgery". The last time I had it was on my nose. It hurt. I figure the farther away from your brain though, the less painful it is. Is that a medical fact? I don't know, it sounds suspiciously close to the realm of medicine that thinks "leaches make great bandaids". Ouch. Anyway, I'm trying to balance my 5 humors for tomorrow's surgery.

I'm not a big fan of hurting. I don't like the word "slicing" or the term "puncture wound". I think some cosmic force has been trying to warm me up to my impending surgical pain, because in the last few days I have hurt myself a lot.

So I was cooking chicken the other day, and I accidentally poured too much low-fat canola oil (plug for good cholesterol) in the bottom of the pan. I wanted to pour it out, but neither the sink nor the garbage was a viable option, and I didn't want to go for the old "spill oil everywhere trying to get it from the wide pan to the one inch bottle" routine. I decided to just leave it in the pan, and to turn the stove on high. That way it would heat the oil up to an evil temperature.
So after about about 3 minutes of that my chicken had defrosted in the microwave, and I decided to THROW the chicken... into the molten crucible of death from about a foot away, and it exploded grease all over my right hand. My beautiful dominant hand, the hand I had intended to make millions off of modeling with on TheShaneCompany.com, and in Swatch Catalogues across the nation. Why do you mock me fate? Well that really hurt, for a good few hours, but it also really ticked me off. Why is it, when you do something really stupid, you're mad at everyone else?
I tried to take my mind off it and earlier that day, my roommate had stolen my internet capabilities, and so I went outside in a huff,(and in barefeet mind you) to wrangle my cord back through my window, and while doing so, dropped a two by four with it's sharp corner right on my oh so tender foot. Then in hopping around like a wimpy idiot,(because that's what you do when you hurt your foot, at least in movies starring Macaulay Culkin) I bounced right onto a sharp stick, and impaled the bottom of my foot. Right then, as I was not so silently swearing, a bee flew up and landed on my ear. I swore that if he stung me, I would bold out into the street and jump in front of a garbage truck to finish me off, but the bee didn't have time, because right then I heard a whistling noise and an anvil fell from a clear sky, hit me on the head and dug me into the ground. Then the roadrunner ran by and let out a taunting "meepmeep".
I think you can decipher where the truth stops there, but it was ridiculous! I just hope that after tomorrow I don't set off airport security checkpoints, because the doctor left his Rolex in my abdomen.

It's Good to be King...of Animals

I was just thinking, it's good to know that we can eat things. Anything we want to, we can eat. I could eat a parrot if I wanted to. I was just thinking who else on this planet can claim that besides humans. Sure it would be hard for me to get one at a minutes notice, but if I wanted to I could eat a parrot...eventually, probably within the next day or so. How many sharks do you know that can say that. They would'nt have the means of communication or transportation. How many sharks could say they've eaten a parrot? None! Because sharks can't talk.

Sure alot of these animals can eat us, especially our friend the shark. But I would imagine we've eaten way more of them than they have of us. I bet the human to shark eating ratio is way higher than vise versa, and that's where you lose sharks! That's where man stands alone.
I could eat a gorilla within the next few weeks if I really put my mind to it, and a shark never could. Sure some freak zoo shipping accident might happen in the atlantic and a shark could eat a drowned gorilla (after he got him out of his cage of course), but is drowned gorilla really the same.
It's just comforting to know that I could eat anything. Come to think of it I could go for a yogurt right now. I think I will.

Movie Review - Layer Cake

Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Movie Review - Layer Cake

For some reason I have been slightly obsessed with all things UK for several years. The Office, 28 Days Later, Groundskeeper Willie. Among these I could include an entire genre of British gangster films, not least of which were directed by Guy Ritchie (Lock Stock...Snatch, though I liked the first better), so when Layer Cake came along, a film directed by the Ritchie's producer Mathew Vaughn, I knew I would like it, but I didn't know how much. Well...I like it. I like Daniel Craig alot. There's word that he will be the next James Bond. He wouldn't be my first choice, because he seems too...good. He doesn't seem to fit the one dimensional swagger of 007, and he's got real emotion behind his eyes. They're deep. Anyway, the movie revolves around the career of a mid-level drug trafficker (Craig) who is never named, whose career is successful until he starts getting reamed from all directions. The movie has a fairly non-somber feel and is kind of lighthearted at times (Craig is actually quite funny) until things take an incredibly drastic turn to the dark. It reminded me of Ocean's Eleven in the way it weaves and bobs, but with far more menace. The editing is fantastic. Vaughn is far more subtle than his friend Ritchie, and the movie glides along smoothly. One scene that was totally cool was the scene where Nameless is trying to take out the Bosnian (Serbian?) guy in the park. Neato intense. Check it out.

The Origin of the Fleeces

Why am I having such a hard time with this blog? It seems that I cannot create a "first real post".
I guess the root of my problem is the term "blog". What is that term? "Blog?" People can't just say "Web Log", or even "Online Journal" or perchance you want to throw caution to the wind and say "Web Diary". What is this obsession for shortening and cute-sifying things, especially online. LoL, BrB.

We even shorten or change our names. Why do men, grown men, insist on being called Skip or Chucky.
If you're gonna go with a nickname or abbreviate something at least make it rugged or full of Chutzpah. Where are the nickname's for today's man's man. Where are the "Rockys" and "Phoenixes" for goodness sake, where are the "Vipers" or "Scorpios".

I don't know where this dislike for nicknames comes from. I don't know why I hate the adorable term "Blog". I guess it's just a remnant of my youthful disdain for things that were considered "cool". Growing up it was trendy to not be trendy. If it was popular, it was lame.

Of course there was an evolution of this "anti-trend". At first this bucking the trend of trendiness was all about clothes. It was always cool to not wear trendy clothes. In the beginning not wearing the trendy fashions, came from the simple fact that Mom bought all your clothes, and thought that button up the front, pink tucked in plaid was pretty neat. In middle school if kids were wearing Z-Cavaricci's for instance then you wore dockers, or jean shorts that were far too short for you to sit comfortably in math class across from that quaintly plain Chinese girl who you were sure was staring up your leg at your "tighty whities". I'll always remember you Grace Wang. You were the first...
It wasn't choice. It was all you got, and your tender heart didn't have the guts to tell your mother "no mom, I don't want to shop at Mervyns anymore." There was no way to be trendy even if you tried.

Then high school came along, and a minimum wage job at Cinna-bon meant YOU took control of the anti-trend. You were used to wearing alternative clothes (as geeky as they were) and not being trendy morphed into shopping at Goodwill, and paying for clothes by the pound. If it had "Fred's Steamers" on the chest or some other non-sequitor nonsense beamed down from a planet orbiting the seventies you were "in"...or "out" as the case may be (It was very confusing where you stood).
Then someone of course would argue that shopping at a thrift store was trendy, that even when you're trying to not be trendy, you were in essence still being trendy. And of course they were right.

I'm older now, and of course I'm trying to be true to myself, I have tried to maintain my anything but trendy status. Yet like a hippy turning his eyes from the earthy flames of beach bonfires and folk songs, who now sits at his cushy CPA job, gone from Berkeley to Boise crunching numbers instead of getting the munchies, I too have strayed from the path of the anti-trend.

Now, it's hard work to not be trendy. Did you ever think that large groups can sometimes be right. I watched "Lost" last night. They were right. I liked it. I have an IPOD. I don't think I could live without it. I've actually uttered the words (though it shames me nie unto death) "Did you tape 'American Idol'?". I've learned not to care as much about not being trendy, and therefore, I must surrender my "cool/hip" status. I must surrender to the power of the Blog.
Hey, even a black sheep still has to follow the flock. Baaaahhhh!

The People's Republic of Random Entry 1

Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novella "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" was based on one of his contemporaries a local politician and shoe salesman who robbed houses at night.

A family portrait

My Mom Dad and Sister