Page 2 holds the jokes for a day

As much as we'd like to believe otherwise, our lives are what they are partially because of luck.

As this article reminds me, a single stroke of bad luck can change everything in a heartbeat. Thankfully Brian Boyle is an amazingly strong man. His story impressed the heck out of me.

You can also read his story in his own words at the same site that I got the photo.

Newer news than the new news

Sorry, folks...busy day...no glimpses my way, though I did get the pictures taken...

Instead, enjoy the very cool new use of Google.

And you can check the Google service itself.

So very, very cool...

Once more...with feeling this time

I've mentioned Niki Huey before (former student, current model).

Well, Calen sent me a link to another new video that features Niki. This time, however, she at least gets to express a little bit of emotion.



And based on the pacing of his singing, I think the black guy in the video just might be stuck in a closet.

Oh, and here're Niki's words introducing the video...

Hello everyoneeee
I swear I do lots of things other than music videos, I'm just really bad at the whole sending things home and showing people thing and music videos are the easiest thanks to youtube. :)

Here's Enrique Iglesias' new music video "Away". And yes, he is hot in person! hahahaha

Let the man speak for himself

Christopher Nolan's been fairly quiet about the future of the Batman franchise, and he's totally within his right to do that since he's made the best comic book movie ever. Thankfully, however, he's broken the silence with a lengthy interview in the Los Angeles Times...check out part 1...part 2...and part 3.

If you're gonna learn, might as well get it straight from the horse's mouth.

The weirdness that is

I love Wikipedia. If it weren't for the most awesomest user-edited encyclopedia in the world, I wouldn't know things like these...

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is a linguistically correct sentence.

There have been hundreds of fictional US presidents including my favorite.

Some teams at the University of Hawaii (listed as Hawai'i) are still the Rainbow Warriors.

Prince has a lot of pseudonyms.

Only five albums were in the #1 spot in 1984.

Simon & Garfunkle were - I think - the last act to replace themselves on the Billboard #1 album chart.

The Monkees owned 1967.

Neil Young was not inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame three times like I'd thought. Apparently it's just CSN not CSN&Y in there.

"Rainbow Connection" was ripped off in 1979.

Bryan Derksen liked Wikipedia, too.

He's afraid of bears

Because the Colbert Nation allows embeds...

Digging on REM's new album...and getting all the chicks...


Getting jiggy with weatherproofing...


Wording the Mavericks...


Predicting the future of the intertubes...


Ron Pauling...


Talking to the past version of himself...


Introducing Sarah Palin...


Wording catharsis...


Checking in with Nas...


Bleeping a tribute...


Checking with Will Smith about playing Obama...

Short songs

Eleven songs...the total playlist won't even take you twenty minutes...they're brief...

LA's Story

What's Chicago's film legacy? Blues Brothers, maybe. But is there a second film that truly uses Chicago as a character?

Cincinnati's film legacy is pretty much WKRP in Cincinnati and a few scenes in Rain Man.

Hell, Lousivlle - my big city of birth, give or take - is pretty much one scene in Stripes.

Miami has a few more flicks, but it's pretty much Scarface and Miami Vice even then.

But there are a couple of American cities that live more in myth than in reality, whose image of them in our brains comes from film more than from reality. One of them is New York, and the other is Los Angeles, ye olde City of Angels.

And the publication of note out in LA has put together a list of the Twenty-five best Los Angeles movies, and it's a hell of a list with weighty flicks...

• LA Confidential at #1
• Boyz N the Hood at #4
• The Player at #6 (genius, absolute genius)
• Collateral at #9
• Less Than Zero at #22
• even Crash at #25

...and lighter fare...

• Clueless at #7
• Repo Man at #8
• The Big Lebowski at #10
• the freakish Mulholland Drive at #11
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit at #12
• the vastly overrated Swingers at #14
• Friday at #16
• Speed at #17
• Valley Girl (one of Calen's faves, I'm sure) at #18
• my absolute favorite of the list LA Story at #20
• Fletch at #23

It's a list to work trough some day...some summer.

Thoughts on an election

I am, by nature, a cynic.

My general beliefs are that...

• there aren't ghosts
• we have less control over our world than we would like to believe
• dramatic changes are amazingly rare
• that game you just saw that is the best ever probably is just the best recently
• most politicians are trying to do their best but in a huge system that has amazing inertia
• as much as you'd like to believe otherwise, your team probably isn't going to win because there are a lot more non-winners than winners every season
• there isn't a higher power than science
• all your cheering and lucky shirts have almost no effect on the outcome of the big game

And because of that inherent cynicism, I find it increasingly hard to get excited about much of anything. I watch almost every sports contest without much of a rooting interest and certainly without cheering or booing at the screen because I know that what will happen will happen whether I'm getting all worked up about it or not. And I tend to watch the news with a general level of dispassion.

But every now and then...

Every so often...

Something comes along that feels different.

That just might be significant.

I have heard people say in the days leading up to Tuesday's election that this election would be the defining moment of our times, our generation, our country. That things would somehow be different now. That history was being made.

My default position on most of those things was that we rarely know when defining moments happen until far after they've happened, that we don't usually know when history is being made because we can't predict the hundreds of millions of ripples that our every action will make upon our global pond.

In light of all this, it's tough for me to admit that the election of Barack Obama...excites isn't the right word...fills me with hope is too hokey...inspires isn't quite right. I wish that I were a speaker of German so I could make up a new word that mean fills me with a sense of hopefulness and joy tinged with a fear that this hopefulness will come to nothing if the source of the excitement turns out to be nothing but empty talk, because that's much closer to the feeling that Obama's election has brought me.

On Tuesday I voted for a president for the first time.

I'd voted in presidential elections before - which, by the way, major shout out to TL who fought for her vote much more than I did and got to cast her first vote in a big one - but I'd never voted for a candidate before.

Al Gore inspired me so little that I voted for Ralph Nader. John Kerry didn't inspire me. Nor did Bill Clinton, even, in my first presidential election.

I voted in all of those elections for the candidate that I preferred, but I didn't vote for those candidates as much as I voted for the candidate that I disliked less or least.

But I voted for Barack Obama because his words, his speeches, his campaign inspired me. He didn't run the default Democratic campaign even though many of his positions would have fit it well. He ran a campaign built on defining himself as a candidate of hope, of change (as cliched as that became in the course of this campaign), and of inclusion.

He offered to help and challenged us to set aside our differences to help each other. He warned us of sacrifices that would be necessary in his administration for us to help others - through health care, through charity, through taxes. And I didn't mind. Quite the opposite, I relished the honest turn in which a candidate didn't tell me that he could hang the moon and the stars without asking to stand on my shoulders.

And, damn, it's scary to think that I've put myself so far out there, allowed my cynicism to peel away even a bit and hope for once. I feel almost the way I would if I'd just written the words I love you to a girl in a letter and sent that letter out into the ether not knowing what would ever come of the admission, whether she would turn out to be worth the hope and the risk.

And we won't know for a long time whether this girl was...is worth the risk.

...

Opinions related to the election that I've particularly enjoyed and/or sympathized with...

• Tom Tomorrow's blog posts from November 5th
• Kyle's thoughts on fear and its release
• Katydid's close-up view of history
• Chris's reasons to vote Obama
• Calen's challenge
• Geddy Lee's ponderings on "Free Will"
• Go Tell Mama's campaign work

In honor of whoever was elected yesterday

I'm writing this over the weekend, so I've no clue in whose honor the links list comes up today, but I'm sure somebody deserves it.

• Video of a road being undercut by roaring water
• The most magical kazoo ever
• Another Lego man beached
• Bloodsucking moths
• 20 Greatest Political Ads
• Cool, huge skate ramp
• Outstanding invention
• Crappy charity refusal
• Holy crap cool science video of the week
• Kung Fu Clowns - with a surprise ending
• New Fanboys trailer up and rockin'

That's it for today as I had to wait in line for a solid four hours thirty seconds yesterday to vote and didn't have time to put together any sort of real post.

The glimpses will come back next week...promise...

Don't leave a comment

The Cincinnati Enquirer's website has undergone some radical changes over the past year or two, something that was covered in Wired magazine a little while ago.

They've combined all their local newspapers (formerly the various community papers including the Princeton-area Tri-County Press) into the one website, no longer offering up individual homepages for each. And they've - more noteworthy - also encouraging a lot of what they call citizen journalism which seems to end up being a whole lot of people doing stupid and mostly non-newsworthy self promotion and a lot of very poorly-written local interest articles.

Seriously, look at this piece of crap. There are nothing but short sentences, not a single combination into an actual paragraph. It's like something written by a middle schooler.

The lack of actual reportage - and any sort of consideration for what is worth reporting and what isn't - isn't, however, my beef for tonight. That'll be for another time as we consider the dichotomy between what people want to see/read/hear and what they need to be told. Instead, my complaints for today lie entirely with their increased offerings of comments on every news story.

Take, for example, the comments recently left on a story about the Lakota contract talks:

When are teachers going to realize the make good money? Hey, I haven't had even a cost of living increase in over FIVE years! Do you hear my complaining? No, I understand it's tough out there right now. These teachers who are already making a LOT more than I ever will are never happy. Look, if you don't like being a teacher find another career! But you will quickly find that there isn't much out there which you will make more money. Yes, times are tough....grow up and deal with it like the rest of us. Or does it just kill you to drive home in your big SUV, pull into your huge garage, and then take the family out to eat? Yea, I bet. Spoiled teachers.....sheesh!

...

Be sure to have a full knowledge base of any situation before you rattle off a half-brained response. Don't assume the media has all of the information you need to be fully aware.

...

This sounds like sour grapes to me! I was curious do you have your masters degree? If not... Why don't you go back to school and get your master's degree so you can have a big SUV, huge garage, and go out to eat every night. Please do some more research before you make comments like the one you spewed out above.

We have a craptacular initial comment, one designed to set a tone of only the lowest level of discourse. It's an ignorant rant, practically designed to pick a fight. And it's dumb.

The Enquirer has added the opportunity for people to have intelligent discourse replying to any of the topics that the site covers, but they haven't set anything in place to prevent this kind of asinine, lowest-common-denominator commentary - which is what I find most common to the comment section. And then we get two people saying "oh, you should be more open-minded" when they should really be ignoring the moron and just letting him scream into the ether without response.

See, it's way easier to smack on people if you don't have to see them face to face.

Newspapers - and by extension news websites - should not be for the reporting of every mundane detail of the world nor as forums for every opinion to be bandied about without concern for the factual basis of that opinion.

As much as I want everyone to be free to report and to inform each other - it's important for our freedoms that we have some outlets - I also want there to be some sort of established news entity that can provide a researched, resourced, filtering of what is happening in my world, and a bulletin board service with commentary is not that entity.

Randall had it right.

On the cheap

I just don't think I have the passion about anything to put myself as far out on a limb as did these folks in making the coolest films made for less than a million bucks.

Most of them were made for way less than a million, and I want to give a particular shout out to El Mariachi, Primer, Pi, Brick, Clerks, and Once as my favorites of the list.

And wow...has anybody seen Cube or the rest of the Cube trilogy, because that one sounds fascinating?

You'd have to be blind not to recognize this talent

Just sit back and enjoy the guitar coolness of Jose Feliciano on...

"Ain't No Sunshine"


"Billie Jean"


"La Bamba"


"Malaguena"


"Flight of the Bumblebee"


"Zorba the Greek"


"The Star-Spangled Banner"


"California Dreamin'" - on Soul Train (?)


"Norwegian Wood"


"Twist and Shout"


"Feliz Navidad"


with Bing and Diana Ross & the Supremes on a medley of hits

A warning

Just thought I'd give you good folks a bit of heads up that you may notice something different about me come Monday.

We headed to a costume party at the home of one of The Girl's coworkers - and stopped at Waffle House afterwards there wasn't that much to nosh on at the party.

Feel free to guess who we went as. If you need a hint, check, check, check it out.

Long songs

This week's short in number but long in...um...length...

It's a square list, ten ten-minute songs.

Today's list wouldn't fit on a single music cd.

Race in the race

Race matters.

We'd be fools to think otherwise.

John McCain and Barrack Obama are - as are we all - sum totals of every aspect of who they are. Obama wouldn't be who he is if he weren't black, and John McCain wouldn't be the same if he weren't white.

Their races aren't helps any more than they are hinderances, and to think otherwise would be foolish.

NPR recently asked the people of York, PA - where their reporters have been visiting off and on throughout the summer - what their hopes and fears were for what happens after this coming election, and race came up very strongly.

Here are a few quotes, but I recommend reading the full story...

"I don't want to sound racist, and I'm not racist," Moreland says. "But I feel if we put Obama in the White House, there will be chaos. I feel a lot of black people are going to feel it's payback time. And I made the statement, I said, 'You know, at one time the black man had to step off the sidewalk when a white person came down the sidewalk.' And I feel it's going to be somewhat reversed. I really feel it's going to get somewhat nasty."

...

"I think there's more fear if you're really afraid of something bad happening. I hate to say this, but let [Obama] not win," Weary says.

And there is another set of fears for Weary: He says that he's "more afraid of the Joe Six-Packs looking for payback after Barack Obama wins the presidential election."

I'm a horrible person

There are all sorts of reasons that I'm a horrible person...

Today's opener is the fact that I know that the secret to comedy is a midget. My general standing argument is that everything is funnier with a midget.

Yes, it's an offensive thing to say, and for that I apologize. But it's kind of true.

For evidence, I offer you Under the Rainbow and Terror of Tiny Town.

I also recognize that the reality of life as a midget would be incredibly tough, trying to manage in a world designed for people built drastically differently than you. Because of this, I realize that midgets are not - in and of themselves - funny in any real-world way. Yet I continue to insist that midgets are the keys to comedy.

This was brought on by the recent Rock the List about the most sensational midgets ever. Which is wrong because they forgot Billy Barty.

---

There's this guy that The Girl used to work with who runs a scavenger hunt / Amazing Race kind of thing every spring and fall. He signs up a dozen teams of four and runs 'em around our county collecting receipts, taking photos, buying stuff (in the fall) and accomplishing various stupid tasks (in the spring).

He's helped out by a half dozen of his friends who judge the various events and help run things.

And I hate two of them.

Hate them.

They don't necessarily seem like horrible people, and I've heard that they do a lot of good work for the local school system and all. The lead guy seems to like them, and he seems to be a pretty good guy.

But I can't stand being anywhere around them. And it's mostly because of their voices.

They're twins - yes, Calen, you probably know the guys I'm talking about - and they drive me frickin' batty every time they open they mouths.

Their tone of voice is so grating and snotty and nasty that I have to leave their presence almost immediately upon hearing them speak. At the Amazing Race a couple of years ago, in the heat of one of the events (trying to throw gumballs into a series of buckets a la Bozo's Grand Prize Game) I'll admit that I called one of them a rather vulgar term when he wouldn't make the rules a little clearer to me - and continued to just chatter on unhelpfully about how I wasn't supposed to be doing things.

It isn't something that I was proud of, but it happened. The voice finally got to me.

I should be mature enough to realize that people can't help the voice that they've been given, but I'm not really able to.

---

And finally, I'm desperately inspired by the donut and bacon candidate, but I have totally ignored every call from MoveOn.org and the local democrats to help out with the campaign. I probably could find a couple of hours to help out, but, man, I'm just tired.

I spent this afternoon hanging on the couch, writing to you folks. Sure, I could've made a few phone calls for Mr. Frazier, but I didn't.

A Glimpse: Me

It'd been a while since I'd updated my photo album of myself on my chemistry webpage. I try to keep a bunch of decent and embarrassing photos of myself posted so that when my students complain that I'm posting horrible photos of them, I can point out tat I do the same of myself.

And it's about time for me to update that album. So here's a new album of your humble ChemGuy.

The initial pic up above, by the way, is courtesy of my new laptop's built in webcam and captures me in my typical fall/winter weekend glory.

New ones from across the pond

I know I promised I wouldn't check the celebriblogs anymore, but someone linked to WWTDD and said that they had posted YouTubes of two new Lily Allen songs, so I had to click through.

Check 'em...

I don't understand

Not in the least...not at all...not even one little bit...

But I'm not going to complain that yesterday I filled up my gas tank for $2.09 a gallon.

The Man in Black bring his friends together

A while back I checked out The Best of the Johnny Cash TV Show on cd, and that got me hunting some of the clips on YouTube.

My interest was piqued, so you get to watch along.

Cash with Roger Miller doing "King of the Road"


Andy Kaufman doing Elvis


Doing "Blue Yodel No. 9" with Louis Armstrong


One of my top five favorite versions of any song I've ever heard...Cash with Dylan on "Girl from the North Country" - you can catch the rest from Cash's premiere episode here


Neil Young on "Needle and the Damage Done"


Joni Mitchell's prettiest tune "Both Sides Now"


Cash doing "Last Train to Clarksville" with the Monkees


Johnny takes center stage with his trademark "Hello, Bill Walker" and a number of solos from Norman Blake


CCR doing "Bad Moon Rising"


Duetting with Jose Feliciano


Dennis Hopper reading poetry


"Smoke, Smoke, Smoke" by Phil Harris - sort of singing


And a bonus - part one of three with Johnny Cash on The Muppet Show - with the very cool "Ghost Riders in the Sky"

The music of the day...

We're trying a new service here...Playist.com...fingers are crossed that it doesn't go the way of Muxtape...

Ten songs that I'm listening to of late...

In which our hero reads an adult book

I'm not sure I would have ever bet that in a million years I would have written the following phrase, but - after reading Angler: the Cheney vice presidency - I have a new-found respect for Dick Cheney.

It had been a good, long while since I'd read a solid book written for adults, the kind of book didn't have drawings on every page and that wasn't consumable in an hour or so. And when Terry Gross had an interview with Barton Gellman, his book Angler sounded like a good one to dive into. And I had forgotten how spectacular is the opportunity to get lost in a book, to sit down and have two hours pass before you notice the time slipping by, to want to read and read instead of accomplish anything else that you need to do, to spend ten or fifteen hours - broken up over a couple of weeks - to devour a book of real substance.

And Angler is certainly that. It's an amazingly thorough and even-handed exploration of how Dick Cheney used his position in the Bush White House to further his beliefs and do what he thought necessary to better our nation. His unique position - a president who trusted him implicitly, a president who concerned himself with the big picture while setting aside "the little things", absolutely no need to consider his own political future, his amazing knowledge of the system via his positions in previous administrations - allowed him to take massive advantage of the systems in place and keep his hands in nearly every pie that interested him.

Cheney put himself in position to influence hundreds of decisions and policies, guaranteed that nearly every position paper that left the White House came through his office and was proofed (and often drastically changed) by his staff members such as David Addington. He helped choose - and with Bush's willingness to focus on the "big issues" was largely choosing - numerous office holders below the top level positions. he wasn't as concerned with naming the Secretary of State because he knew that the half dozen people immediately beneath the Secretary were sympathetic with Cheney's world view. If a policy or position paper didn't jibe with Cheney's worldview, the policy simply never made its way to the Secretary's desk. If the policy was never presented to the Secretary, there was no need for the Secretary to be in 100% agreement with Cheney.

Gellman quotes a number of sources - the end notes section takes up a healthy chunk of the last hundred pages of the book - saying that Cheney was the ultimate staffer, knowledgeable of every back channel within the White House (having been a White House Chief of Staff), the Congress (having been a senator), and the Pentagon (as former Secretary of Defense). He insinuated his email into every mailing list on every issue on which he wanted to have influence. When a policy paper was sent to *Asia, for example, a blind copy was sent to Cheney's emailbox, often times without the knowledge of the paper's author.

Cheney's single largest concern and area of influence was in expanding the power of the executive branch. Cheney's belief was that the other two branches - legislative and judicial - were far too massive and slow-moving to be of any use at all in times of crisis, meaning that the executive branch should be given absolute and unchecked power in any issue that could be remotely connected to war or threat on our nation. To this end, Cheney pushed through - often originating, sometime writing, rarely simply supporting - the Bush administration's policies on military tribunals, secret domestic spying, the use of torture in interrogations, environmental deregulation, and so many issues.

I disagree with - I am very close to being able to say I hate - nearly every policy decision on which Dick Cheney used his influence. I abhor torture. I will always side of freedom over security. I feel that the environment should trump nearly every business concern. And I believe that the three-branch, checks and balances system of government should be designed - as Jefferson stated - to be manned by scoundrels because of those very checks and balances.

But I respect Dick Cheney's determination, knowledge, tireless devotion, and dedication to our nation. He believed he was saving our nation, and he ensured that he did every single thing within his power - power that none of his predecessors was given and that Cheney simply assumed - to keep us safe, and I respect that level of drive, that level of commitment.

From Angler: The Dick Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman...page 389...

Cheney served his country with devotion, at some cost to himself. The stresses of the job did not improve his health. After more than a decade without incident, Cheney suffered eight cardiac events in eight years. He relinquished millions of dollars in stock options and income forgone. The author found no evidence of self-dealing behavior in office, involving Haliburton or anything else. There were times when Cheney stretched the truth, times he may have snapped it clean in half, but he was fundamentally honest about his objectives. Cheney believed that the country was in mortal danger and that he knew better than others how to avert it.

...

Political reputations shift with time. That does not seem to be nearly so true of wars. When voters, generals, and the political class reach consensus on a strategic mistake, they do not tend to change their minds. Rehabilitation has not come for the southern war of secession or MacArthur's march toward the Yalu River which brought China into the Korean War. Nor has the nation's verdict wavered on Vietnam. The Bush-Cheney strategy after September 11, with its claims of White House supremacy and its sharp tilt from civil liberty to state command, enraged even proponents of a unitary executive and a strong national security state. The invasion of Iraq may have passed a point of no return when Dick Armey - the majority leader of the president's party, from the president's home state - said it was "very likely the biggest foreign policy blunder of modern times." Today cannot speak for tomorrow, and Cheney may turn out to be right that the pendulum will not swing back. Nothing is likelier to bring that about than Cheney's worst nightmare made flesh. If Nexus comes, loosing a plague or igniting a mushroom cloud, posterity may decide we should have stayed the vice president's course. This made for a paradox as Cheney neared the end of his second term. His best hope for vindication appeared to lie in a future no one could want, a future in which his efforts failed.

Mostly for TL

Get your hankies ready, folks, and check out the video tributes from Jim Henson's funeral.

In today's stunning announcement...

It appears that Li'l Wayne's assistant told a court that he saw a handgun and marijuana on the tour bus.

Two things...remember, kids, snitches get stitches...and why is this news?

Will we be reporting soon that Americans are fat? that bacon is bad for you? that the sun came up today?

Back to the old school

I really want to see the new Bond movie...

And these don't look bad, either...

• Push
• W - especially the new extended trailer
• Sunshine Cleaning
• Let the Right One In
• The Spirit - which looks both horrifically bad and magnetically intriguing
• Frontrunners
• Frost/Nixon
• Synecdoche, New York
• Surfer, Dude - finally, McConaughey finds a roll like Wooderson

A glimpse: the DVDs

Because it's clearly something that you folks demand, our "A Glimpse" series continues with the DVDs that I own and that live on both sides of my stereo above the television...left side first...from left to right...


Sin City was a great time in the theater. Loved it. The movie hasn't held up on further viewings. It's neat and all, but it's not one I love seeing again and again. And the double disc version is amazingly tedious - except for Robert Rodriguez's Ten Minute Cooking School - which is brilliant and should be watched and to which I would link if it didn't end with a horrific vulgarity.

The Muppet Movie was a gift from Calen after I crabbed that it was stolen by some punks who broke into my house a few years ago. It's one of my all-time favorite movies, and the jokes get me smiling and laughing every time. Cameos out the wazoo - Steve Martin, Mel Brooks, Edgar Bergan, Charlie McCarthy, Charles Durning, Richard Pryor, Dom DeLouise, Milton Berle, James Coburn, Bob Hope, Elliott Gould, Carol Kane, Madeline Kahn, Telly Savalas, Orson Wells - all brilliant. One of my all-time favorite movies.

Fight Club is one I can watch over and over again. I know the twist is coming, and the movie works even better for me because of it.

Hoosiers is the other favorite movie. I'll watch it three or four times every year and break into tears when the minister gives the David and Goliath speech every time. When I first got the DVD, I watched every game scene and skipped every other one...tears anyway. This edition is great because it has all the deleted scenes that make the plot holes close right up. Plus, bonus points because "I think Jimmy can get an academic scholarship to Wabash College."

Then the whole Kevin Smith oeuvre - cartoon, Clerks X, Mallrats 10th anniv, Chasing Amy (the best he's done yet and the one I enjoy watching the least...the movie spoke to me at the time, what can I say), Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back (the worst of them and the one I probably watch the most). Don't know why Degrassi is way out of order, but that a'ight.

North to Katahdin is a documentary about the Appalachian Trail that I bought for The Girl a while back and that we've watched once. It did give me some idea of what her 2100+ mile trip was like.

A Lion in the House is heartbreaking, and I've blogged about it twice before.

The next two are Wilco - one of the band and one of Tweedy alone. The first is a better movie by far, the second a simple concert DVD with extra content that I've never been able to get to work. Which sucks.

The Big Lebowski is the funniest movie I've ever seen. Love it.

The two two-flick DVDs were about $10 each at Target, and I've seen Grosse Point Blank and High Fidelity enough to justify both purchases.

The Wimbledon up top is the last of these to have been in the player. It's the classic final from this past summer. Five full hours of fascinating BBC coverage of the match.



LA Story is the second movie that The Girl and I went to see - our second date. It's a magical and hilarious tale written by and starring Steve Martin.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension is an atrocious piece of 80's filmmaking. It's a product of its era as strongly as almost any I've ever seen. I love it - especially the end credits. The special effects and the make up are awful. AWFUL. I love it.

Family Guy pretty much isn't funny. I enjoyed it briefly, but I hate it now.

Spirited Away from Miyazaki is beautiful. It's an animated feature of stunning beauty. It's been a while since I've seen it because Calen's daughter hasn't been over in a while. She watches it nearly every time she visits.

Rozencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead is the tale of "Hamlet" as told from a different point of view, focusing on his two bumbling friends and their struggles with trying to acknowledge that they have very little - if any - control over their own path in the play. Funny, witty stuff.

Field of Dreams has me in tears at the end every time.

Hero is the finest movie ever made. I stand by that statement. It's the only one that I've given a 100-rating to on criticker.

The Aristocrats is not the Disney movie that you're thinking of. It's the most vulgar movie I've ever seen, all about a single horrifically off-color joke. Do not see it if you're at all offended. By anything. Anything at all.

Kill Bill volume 1, only.

Time Bandits is one out of the childhood and another gift from Calen.

The Triplets of Belleville is an animated film almost entirely in French, probably not ten English words and not many words at all, honestly.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the other flick - with Lebowski - for funniest film I've seen.

The ones up top are all borrow films - Matrix from my neighbor at shcool, Signs and Saving Private Ryan from Coach Sullivan, The Secret as an absolute joke from the guy who lived in my basement last summer, and the 15-Minute Workout is The Girl's loaner.

I'm not sure there was a lick of anything revealing there at all.

Thanks for getting that far.

Where not to buy toys

When you're serious about science, United Nuclear - now of New Mexico but soon to be of Michigan - should be your supplier of choice.

Sure, the sell books and fun stuff, but they also sell some stuff that clearly isn't heading to the kids.

The scariest things that they offer are their - surprisingly - the supermagnets found about halfway down the linked page. The magnets are strong enough that these words are among their warnings:

If carrying one into another room, carefully plan the route you will be taking. Sensitive instruments like computers & monitors will be affected in an entire room. Loose metallic objects and other magnets may become airborne and fly at great speed to attach themselves to these magnets. If you get caught in between the two, you can be severely injured. These magnets will crush bones in the blink of an eye.
Two of these magnets close together can create an almost unbelievable magnetic field that can be incredibly dangerous.
Of all the unique items we offer for sale, we consider these items the most dangerous of all. Our normal packing & shipping personnel refuse to package these magnets - our engineers have to do it. This is no joke or exaggeration - and we cannot stress it strongly enough. You must be extremely careful - and know what you're doing with these magnets.
Two Supermagnets can very easily get out of control, crush fingers and instantly break ribs or even your arm if opposing poles fly at each other.

A small child recently lost his hand when his father left two # 31 supermagnets unattended. The child picked one up and when he approached the other magnet on a nearby table,
it became airborne and obliterated his small hand.

...these are not things that I want to be dealing with.

The DMSO and other chemicals that they sell, on the other hand...or the aerogel...or the tritium light sources...meteorites...glow-in-the-dark paints...

If you need radioisotopes, UN has 'em and a bunch of other radioactive stuff including big samples of uranium metal.

And, seriously, they'll sell this stuff to any schmuck, you or me.

A lot of what they sell is for the explosives, nuclear, and pyrotechnics industries, but that doesn't mean they won't sell to li'l ol' you and me.

And a lot of it is just cool.

Checkin' the flicks

There's been some viewing and some reading, but not a ton of either...



Batman: Gotham Knight - these six stories are designed to be a bridge between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but I don't really see them working in that fashion. The six stories are of varying quality - one seeming like a rehash (primarily "Have I Got a Story for You"), one like a sketch ("Working Through Pain), one an interesting start that never really gets going ("Deadshot"), one too fantastical for the Nolan universe ("In Darkness Dwells"), and two actually right for the Nolan Batman world ("Field Test" and "Crossfire").

They certainly don't hold together with any theme as only two of the six tales have any connection other than Batman's presence, and I don't see any sort of information in these that would help viewers understand the second film. These come off more as continuations of Batman: The Animated Show but in shorter forms as each story only clocks in at about ten or fifteen minutes. They've even used Kevin Conroy who did Batman's voice on the 90's cartoon, as a further echo.

The combination of Batman's stories with the Japanese animation might've been a bit more revolutionary a decade ago, but now it doesn't even seem novel with so much anime and faux anime on everything from Saturday morning 'toons to Cartoon Network.

Meh...

---

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - another in an outstanding if a bit small run of modern western tales...this would've been one to see in the theater as it's a gorgeous, deliberately-paced film telling the tale of Jesse James and the man who ended his life, Robert Ford.

Brad Pitt plays the titular James but feels more like a supporting character as Casey Affleck's Robert Ford is really the center of the story. Through the course of the film, we see Ford shift from boyish adulant, following James around like a devoted puppy to a man both envious and hating and admiring of James to, eventually, a man dealing with the consequences of killing one of the most revered outlaws in American history.

The cinematography is excellent and the film gorgeous and - at times - arduously paced, allowing us to see share in the intertwined lives of the two men, both of whom seem to be existing only as players waiting for fate to bring them together in the assassination. One man has lived his life heading to that point, and the other only seems to exist after the shot is fired and he becomes a part of American lore.

---

Strangers with Candy - This one'd been on the pull list for a while, and The Girl and finally got around to spending a Friday evening with the girl Sedaris child and her freakily, awkwardly hilarious Jerri Blank.

Blank's social reject opens the film by summarizing the backstory that got her into and subsequently out of jail - something that I can only assume would be known to fans who had followed the television series on which the movie is based. From there Blank shows up at home where her new step-mother, nearly grown step-brother, comatose father, and a mission to go back to high school and live her life again from the point where everything went wrong.

All of which would be standard after school special fare if it weren't for the fact that Blank is a former drug and sex addicted ex-convict in her mid forties who has some serious social issues.

Jerri's freakish behavior at the high school - vacillating between befriending and dumping the science dorks at the school, pursuing the popular crowd, coming on to the girl science geek - and the totally nutso staff of administrators and teachers at the school - anchored by Stephen Colbert, Matthew Broderick, Greg Holliman, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Paul Dinello - turn what could have been a very special episode into a tale filled with very special people.

The science teacher is a radical religious right who teaches that evolution is the devil's work but has a clearly un-PC relationship with the male art teacher. The guidance counselor - Jessica Parker looking more attractive than she has in at least a decade - throws herself at every available male staffer and a few of the students. The principal is fighting tooth and nail to not lose his job and have to pay back all the discretionary funds that he has seemingly misappropriated, and one school board member (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) spend most of his screen time openly and vocally pursuing the other (Allison Janney) with no success at all.

The jokes are hit or miss, though I found them to mostly fall on the hit side of the ledger. The pauses and situations can be very uncomfortable, which not every critic enjoyed but which I found mostly hilarious.

It was laugh out loud funny and fine medicine for a Friday evening.

Get ready to rock safely along

It's the Kidz Bop kidz...rockin' your favorite hits like...

"Float On"


"Crazy"


"Sweet Escape"


"The Great Escape"


"Chicken Noodle Soup"


"Since You Been Gone"


"Kryptonite"


"Complicated"


"Bad Day"


"First Time"


"Ice Cream and Guacamole"


the commercial for Kidz Bop 13

Not everyone here is like this

As always, I can't link to Lakes' - foul-mouthed friend that he is - but I can repost the video that he posted recently and that scares me to think that people think this way and, even more so, that they would openly speak this way...



Oh, and this is my first Aljazeera video.

Welcome, folks...

Nilsson Schmilsson

Another in the run of forgotten gems, Harry Nilsson...enjoy it, folks...


SeeqPod - Playable Search

Random pictures

Enjoy the last 250 images (Link has been removed after Calen looked and apparently had her eyes blead from the sheer porn. Please enjoy one of the many fine blog in my blog roll to the right.) uploaded to LiveJournal.

Be warned, however, that sometimes people upload images.

Rockin' the phone lines

This afternoon is the rally downtown - with The National and The Breeders.

This morning it's time to hit the phone lines and order my tickets for the Beasties in Dayton...if The Girl can get her principal to okay her ducking out of conferences an hour early that night, anyway.

She'd gut me like a fish if I went to the Beasties without her.

Sources for new music

Check 'em, folks...

The Smudge of Ashen Fluff - posts new music daily, typically a video and a downloadable mp3. They say that the mp3s only stay for a few days, but they seem to still be around for a lot longer than that for me.

Morning Becomes Eclectic is an LA radio show at KCRW that offers a ton of streaming in-studio video performances - most of them around half an hour long. Some highlight videos can be found here, and the full list of shows here. Let me especially recommend The Black Keys, Vampire Weekend, Ryan Adams, Steve Earle, Band of Horses, Ben Harper, Tim Finn, Bright Eyes, Lily Allen, and lots, lots more.

And it looks like I may be moving over to Playlist.com instead of Seeqpod for a while. No problems with Seeqpod, but I'm going to try Playlist after this weekend's already created tribute to another singer songwriter.