Say Hello to My Boring Friend!



I had never seen Scarface before. I had heard for so long how great it is, how groundbreaking and exciting and violent and profane and on and on, so we put it on our NetFlix queue and watched a few days ago.

My conclusion: that was one of the most bejeezusly boring movies I have ever seen. They really could have made about a 90 minute movie and everything would have been fine. The first hour, after all, was entertaining. People said "mang!" a lot, which is a tried and true benefit for so many movies, like Remains of the Day, Witness and Nell.

We got to see lots of cocaine, lots of Al Pacino setting new records in overacting achievement, Michelle Pfeiffer dancing like a sedated outpatient, a guy getting in touch with his inner chainsaw sculptor. All that was well and good. Also, Tony Montana having really miserable luck with the ladies.

But they had to stretch this thing out for over two and a half hours, with pacing that would have tested Jim Jarmusch's patience. I thought of all the young toughs who crow about the greatness of this movie, in much the same way they espouse the benefits of, you know, Red Bull and those tiny tires that stick out the sides of their cars in a touching tribute to legos. I can't believe these gangster wannabes really like this film.

So again, just give us the first hour and then the exciting finale scene. They can just bust right in to the scene where Pacino has coke dripping off his nose. That would be fine. It would save us all a lot of aggravation and pink and green neon.

Incidentally, with a nice name like Tony Montana, I'm sure there were other career paths open to Pacino's character. I mean, look how well Tony Roma has done for himself with that rib thing. Perhaps a used car lot? I don't know, but for god's sake I wouldn't have had to put up with the movie if he had just listened to his career counselor a little more acutely.

Also also, I don't know what gang of lower mammals did the soundtrack for Scarface, but it sounds like someone with a Casio, a built in beat, and little or no imagination.

Oh my, is this addictive

Dyson vacuum cleaner flash game.

Finally, a dog wedding dress we can all be proud of.

...And Here My Troubles Began

I have been deeply embroiled in the sordid world of management training at work, where the heady scent of employee empowerment leaves us breathless and reeling. We are the opium eaters drunk on the sweet ambrosia of efficiency. Lost and giddy, we spin in this dance of regular appraisals, and to our subjects we give what? What? A sense of entitlement! Of belonging to a team that cares about them and doesn't think about sandwiches when they are talking.

And what did I learn in this golden castle in the sky, besides don't eat the puffy cake-like doughnuts?

How to effectively humiliate your employees, that's what. Sure, you may think it's enough to snigger at them for no reason, and constantly remind them how much more money you make than they do, or indeed ever will, but that's just not enough these days. The world is changing. Men are rising in the east and the elves...no, no wait. Let's start that again.

It's not enough these days to make them feel small, alone and friendless. You've got to cut right to the quick. Probe deep for childhood trauma. Did they wet the bed? Were they laughed at ever by members of the opposite sex? Do they have psoriasis? An extra toe? Use that power! Remember, if your employees ever feel good about themselves, they may realize that they're smarter than you, and then everybody might find out!

All She Left Behind - A moving story of man and hairdryer.

[via Cardhouse]

Justly Married - Derek Powazek of San Francisco is raising money for Don't Amend by selling a poster of his photo taken at City Hall.

or, why not

Donate money to buy flowers for a random gay couple waiting to get married?

Walk On the Rice Paper, and Leave No Mark

AH! Oh my dear lord!

Must pre-order...Kung...Fu....

Especially that one where he gets bitten by the scorpion and he's having all those crazy visions and....oh, man. I can't wait.

I love Kung Fu. It was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid, and I don't care if David Carradine doesn't look particularly Asian. That show was really formative for me. It gave me a different view of things than the everyday, inspired my lasting enjoyment of martial arts and westerns both. And resulted in some truly incredible fake-fighting, the level of which is seldom witnessed outside the arena of professional wrestling.

I may have told this story before, but when I toiled away as a bagel shop worker under the steely gaze of Julio the Suicidal Bagel Shop Manager, I burned the holy hell out of my upper arms one day while carrying a tray of fresh bialies through a doorway. What happened was I had just taken the tray out of the gigantic, walk-in size oven and as I went through the doorway to the counter area, the tray caught on the doorframe, pushing it back into my biceps.

This hurt.

But in that moment of burning the crap out of my arms (I would have large repulsive blisters there for a couple of weeks), I saw myself as Kwai Chang Cain, lifting the steaming kettle, branding the dragons into his arms.

Somehow, it's not quite as street-credible when you're carrying bialies in the Capitola mall.

I felt the slowdown coming, like the icy onset of old age. The hourglass staying longer. The sands of time fleeting, serving as a warning.

I should have known. I put graphics in. And the table. Then I was splitting the cells.

Too many splits. Too many cells.

The scrolling slowed. Slowed. Like too many Octoroks moving on the screen at once.

And then, the beautiful moment of extinguishing.

You, Microsoft Word.

You.

Give Until It Hurts, Old Man

Something terrible happened this week.

Of course, terrible things are happening all over the world all the time, especially with this administration in office (Ha! Zing! Pow! Please, tip your server).

No, something terrible. Truly awful. Worse than an Eagles Rock Block. Worse than having the Growing Pains theme song stuck in your head. Marginally worse than going to the store at seven in the morning because you're out of milk for your coffee and buying buttermilk by accident. Or acidophilus, which is frankly a silly word which I promise never again to use in this weblog (or "webl" as the cool kids call it).

What happened was that my university alumni club (UC Santa Cruz, home of the Fighting Banana Slugs, patchouli, and mildew) called me for some dough. That's fine. I can understand how they need the money, what with Arnold Very-Big-Liar as our governor here in California. I have given them donations before, but this time, I opted out by telling the nice young lady on the phone that I would have to wait until my tax return.

This is technically not true. It's just something that came out instead of "I just don't feel like it right now." As a result, they'll call me back in a few months, and I'll have to come up with another excuse.

Then, she sprung it on me: "You know, this would be a great time to get involved with the school again*. Your ten year reunion is coming up."

I had a soap opera moment. I held the receiver away from my ear and looked at the earpiece, as if removing the source of the grim news could somehow pull the memory of the words from my head.

Ten. Year. Reunion.

And not a ten year high school reunion! A ten year college reunion! Jesus Christ. I went to work this morning feeling spry and youthful, and with only a few words, this person had turned me into freaking Methuselah. Should I be thinking of retirement? Moving to Florida? Shaking my cane at gangs of young toughs? Or even, since this how I originally misspelled the last sentence, shaking my can at gangs of young toughs?

How can this be? Have ten years flown by so fast?

OK. I'm done whining about that.

But on the subject of giving, I gave to KCRW for the first time yesterday. I didn't give enough to get any of the "free" gifts that come along with pledging, but they did tell me that I had earned the right to be smug about listening to NPR, so I'll be looking down my nose at people just that much more this year, I can tell you.

Also, I gave them money to help defer the cost of their new Super Duper Studios, so they entered me in a drawing to win a Jaguar. I don't usually enter contests of any sort, but immediately my brain took the thought of me winning this car as a given. "A Jaguar!" I scoffed. "Who the hell would want a Jaguar? They're owned by Ford now, for one thing, and they're starting to resemble some unholy union of a Jaguar and a Taurus. So what am I going to do with my Jaguar? I'll sell it. And I'll buy something cool. Like that Lexus Sport Wagon...Maybe a Volvo."

And then it rang true. I'm thinking of selling my Jag and buying a Volvo.

I'm lucky it's not my twenty-fifth reunion. It's all over. I'll just be over here, in the corner, drinking my acidophilus.






*I was not very involved in the college experience. I transferred in from a community college, lived off campus and graduated after two years, with a BA in Modern Literature, which is great if you're into Henry Miller and semiotics, but not that great if you're into being employed or knowing anything even tangentially useful. My final exam was of the oral variety. I talked about Don Delillo and Dostoyevsky and Faulkner in a satisfactorily vague way until they agreed to give me my degree.

Added a Thelonious Monk show and a Can show to the boot trading list, if you are so inclined.

There has been an ugly trend toward physical fitness in the Kafkaesque household lately.

Yesterday, tennis. Today, a ten mile hike. That's right. Ten miles. It's not enough for us to hike ten miles, either. It was necessary that we hike a trail designed by a cruel sadist, filled with unreasonably steep ascents and populated by mountain bikers intent on forcing us from the trail into patches of cactus.

As a result, my feet have fallen off.

But that's OK, because we made it home just in time for the ultimate couch potato event: the Super Bowl. The game itself was pretty good, and the halftime show lived up to the terrible heights of all Super Bowl halftime shows. The lineup was like an ascending ranking of awfulness: P. Diddy. Fair enough. P. Diddy is awful, but you can just say "OK, it's a halftime show. It's going to suck." And your suspicions are well-founded when you see P. Diddy. But just as you ease into that level of crappiness, out comes Nelly!

Nelly is a new low. You long for the carefree days of only P. Diddy on stage, as the two cavort around on stage and the cheerleaders sing "Oh Mickey", cutely substituting "Diddy" for "Mickey". It is clear that P. Diddy is a musical genius.

But then, there's more! It's Kid Rock! Kid Rock is surely the sign that the bottom has been reached. He's wearing an American Flag poncho of some sort. He's blathering about something and saying his own name a lot. They pay him for this. His appearance is proof positive that anything can be made worse by a Kid Rock number.

Anyway, There was also Janet Jackson. Janet Jackson is par for the course on halftime shows as far as I'm concerned. Janet Jackson is awful, yes, but at least it's not Christina Aguilera. Or that opera-singing cop. And there was Justin Timberlake, and frankly I don't really know who that is.

I'm sure everyone has heard about the super-duper outrageous and in-no-way-planned-for-publicity move in which this Timberlake fellow bared Janet Jackson's boob for the seven people out there who haven't already seen Janet Jackson's boob.

OK, now we've all seen Janet Jackson's boob. We can sleep soundly, safe in the knowledge that Janet Jackson has a boob.

And really, we've got Nelly singing "Take off all your clothes!" to prepubescent teens. How hypocritical is it that when someone actually does take off some clothes, the censors lose it?

That's all the insightful boob commentary I have for you. I have to try to grow some new feet.

I want to party with these guys.

Particularly, Topi.

The business continues.

I have been thinking this site needs livening up a bit. Maybe a wacky sidekick is the way to go. My first choice, "Guy Dressed as Mountain" from the Ricola ads was unavailable, though. My second choice, Slim Goodbody, is too distraught over the recent death of Captain Kangaroo. Where does that leave me?

Sidekickless. That's where.

Maybe I should look into corporate sponsorship. I envision My Life as an American Gladiator brought to you by Tostitos. I would be willing to eat a lot of Tostitos for some big corporate sponsorship payoff, I can tell you. Sure, they'll have to airlift my greasy, bloated corpse out of the house after a month of Tostito bingeing, but it'll be worth it. This site will turn into It's a Small World at Disneyland, which was a lesson for all of us in the evils of corporate sponsorship.

I didn't realize for years that It's a Small World was a big ad for Mastercard. The part at the end where all the multicultural dolls are tossing credit cards back and forth and gleefully signing their life away to credit card debt never hit home, until I got a little older and the horrible truth was revealed to me: sure, the English version of the It's a Small World song is all about living together in peace and harmony until your brain starts to dribble out your nose from the sheer cuteness and repetition of it all. But some of the other versions, they're not so innocuous.

Literally translated, the Burmese version heard on It's a Small World:

Buy buy buy buy
Waste waste waste waste
Leave your debt to your children.
My ox has escaped and savaged the village.
You need seventeen Mastercards.

I'm pretty sure on most of the words, anyway.

Once again, there have been no posts.

It's like some old industrial era Russian film, with two wizened old peasants huddled around a kerosene lantern for warmth. The crone looks up at the old man, the lamp's meager light dancing in her miasmic, cataract-cloudy pupils, and says "When, Aleksei? When will there again be posts?"

Except she says it in the cyrillic alphabet. You know.

And he replies "Olga, my love. There are no more posts. If God is dead, how can posts be?"

The camera pans away, to a black and grey landscape, past trees that will never bear fruit*, past the Mariachi band, and into the distance.

*ahem*

But the truth is I have been busy. Mighty busy. Like twelve hour days at work kind of busy.

Another thing that has kept me busy is that I took a beginning Photoshop class. I have been using Photoshop for years, but never with any sort of rhyme or reason, and I figured it would be worthwhile to start at the beginning and make sure I have the basic knowledge before moving on to the intermediate course. Consequently, I was in a class with some people who were not terribly astute in the computer arena. One particular woman, sitting a few computers away, would screech out at every instruction "What? What?? How do I do that? It's not working! Help!" and that sort of thing.

My favorite thing she blurted out was when she had to configure the program or something and she panicked and shouted "It wants to know what time zone I'm in!" as if her computer had just asked her to recite pi to twenty-seven decimals.

The class went pretty well, and I got to feel really smart as most of my fellow students lobbed rocks at their monitors and claimed that bad juju was emanating from the light-filled devil-boxes.

And the really important thing is that I learned how to use the Clone Stamp tool. So just back off.






* Because they're not fruit trees.

Misterpants is back in business.

Alternately, Misterpants is back in town. Either one, really.

I actually watched a Curling Skins Game on Fox Sports World the other day. It was sponsored by "M and M Meat Shops", which I found entertaining.

Also, the guy that won had a gigantic shiny bald head that looked a lot like a curling stone. I wondered if he had ever glued a handle to his shiny pate for Halloween and gone as a stone. Or if his head had ever been curled by accident by an overenthusiastic curler. Also: are there curling idiots like there are American football idiots and, if so, do they wear some sort of celebratory Curling headgear, a la the Crazy Football Head below?



UPDATE: After a good seven minutes of surfing, I can find no Crazy Curling Heads.

Also, I ventured into Tower Records at lunch, to pick up Arcadia of My Youth on DVD. I should add parenthetically that cartoons featuring Captain Harlock are not geeky in any way, so just cool it.

Anyway, I was waiting in line behind a woman who had a double pram with two baby units in it. That was well and good. Unfortunately, the Tower cashier employed the usual Tower stratagem of not calling anyone else to help her despite the fact that there are seven people in line and she's never seen a traveler's check before in her life ever. Still, I am used to this at Tower, and when I'm in line I find little ways to distract myself, like picturing an elaborate musical comedy with all the main roles played by hermit crabs.

The problem was that the guy behind me in line was RIGHT behind me. Like I could feel him breathing on me. That kind of behind me. It's a strange phenomenon I've noticed in Southern California: people have no concept whatsoever of personal space. I tried moving around a little bit, veering off to the side of the line, and this guy stayed on me like a damn remora. Worse than a remora, really, because he didn't do anything vaguely helpful or symbiotic, like picking mites off my pelt. He just hovered there.

When I was done paying, some ten minutes later*, The guy was blocking my path to get out of the store. I seethed "exCUSE me!" hoping that somehow he would get the message that I don't need any remoras at this stage of my life, but I only succeeded in sounding like kind of a whack job. What would have been the right etiquette in that situation? Damned if I know.


* That's Tower Records Line Time, so I can't be sure how long I was really there. It could have been just a couple of minutes. Maybe I never did get out! Maybe I'm still there, slowly decaying into a small stain on the $2.99 CD stand...right between Gene Loves Jezebel and Herbie Hancock.

I don't have all that much to report right now, although I did have a kind of weird dream last night that involved an HP Lovecraft Diner or Deli of some sort. I don't remember much except that the breakfast menu featured The Cheese Omelet of Unknown Kadath. It probably is not in your best interests to order a foodstuff with the word "Unknown" in the title. There may have been others, like The Hotcake Out of Space or The Croissanwich Horror, but I am uncertain.

On the whole, Cthulhu Mythos-related breakfasts are to be avoided.

The Christmas Report

I am back, back from a land slightly colder and greener, and where people use their turn signals a little more than here in The Southland, as weather personalities call Orange County. Then they go back to Live And Continuous Coverage Of The Storm Of 2003, where they will keep you updated every five minutes about the tree that fell on someone's Lexus, before switching over to more pressing things, like coverage of A Day In The Life of a USC Cheerleader or something.

We have to keep our priorities straight.

Our drive to the Bay Area was long, as expected, with some truly inspirational bouts of bad driving on display. For those unfamiliar with the route from The Southland to the Bay Area of California, I'm here to tell you that it's straight. There is a stretch of about 3 hours that you spend on a road called Interstate 5, where you long for a pothole, a curve, a seven-car pileup, just to break the monotony.

Only a couple of things livened up the proceedings:

1- The Near Death Experience.
I try to nearly kill us every time we make this trip. This time was a little disappointing as the Near Death Experience occurred around the corner from our house before we even got on the freeway. I innocently looked the other way and next thing I knew the wifely friend was shouting something that I think was Swahili for "you are about to have a faceful of Oldsmobile!" and executing the traditional hand-on-the-dashboard maneuver so efficacious in high-speed collisions. Thankfully, I stopped in time and did not get a faceful of Oldsmobile.

Honestly I wasn't going all that fast, and if I had rear-ended the car in front, it would have resulted only in annoyance, but I went ahead and saw a tunnel with light at the end and Jesus and a pissed off goldfish whose water I didn't dechlorinate in the fourth grade, just to be on the safe side. This out-of body experience lasted only long enough for me to bother that John Edward guy and hide a few people's keys, and then I snapped back to my earthbound frame and quickly and vehemently denied there was any possibility I would have hit the car in front.

2- Infinitely Recurring REM
We were terribly excited to try out a new music system on this trip. The wifely friend had recently gotten an iPod as a bonus at work for being exemplary, which is an understatement if ever there was one. My bonus at work was a giftcard for Target and thinly veiled hostility, but I try not to complain. Anyway, we usually just bring along twenty or thirty CDs for the trip, which I select and she has veto power over. The usual process is "What is this white CD? Is it twangy? It's not twangy is it? Is it Nick Drake? We don't want to fall asleep..."

That sort of thing.

I should say that while our musical tastes do overlap in places, she prefers Industrial Dance Music and I prefer depressing music about death. Because we should always remember that we are but a step away from the cold, wormy grave, and frankly it's just irresponsible to go a few moments without a syncopated reminder of the fact.

We braved the mall a little while ago and picked up an iPod FM Transmitter for the car, since I have a CD deck and I couldn't seem to force the iPod through the little slot. Everything was going swimmingly for a time, as we selected our choices and beamed happily. Then, a couple of hours into our drive, we started to notice some distortion. This, we logically assumed, was due to the station we selected to receive the iPod broadcast being overcome by some Mariachi station, which are very, very numerous in this neck of the woods. Undaunted, we reset the iPod to another station, but with the same result.

A growing fear began to set in as we played tag with the Mariachi stations. Our happy Flaming Lips or, alternately, Russian Industrial Dance Music, would get all fuzzy and and soon would be pretty much unlistenable fuzz. There's nothing quite like the irritation of driving at night in heavy traffic at high speeds, with white noise blaring from your speakers.

Luckily, I had a CD along. It was an REM compilation which is actually really good, and relieves you of the inevitably lackluster five songs in the middle of every REM album ever. The problem was that we still had over four hours left on our drive, maybe five with the traffic the way it was, and after two times through the same CD, I was ready to fling that bad boy out the window.

OK, I thought, if I hear "Driver Eight, Take a break" one more freaking time, I can't be held responsible for my actions, and we were reduced to messing with the iPod again, until it was determined to be all my fault since I had been using the backlight too much and wearing down the battery. Then, all of a sudden, we figured out that we had the volume jacked all the way up on the iPod, and when we turned it down, the distortion disappeared.

All was once again happiness, and Michael Stipe no longer had to fear that I would find him and kill him.

3- The Christmas Robot
The Christmas Robot is the newest addition to our Christmas tree. He joins his friend Frog Dressed as Cowboy Sheriff as The Ornaments Most Honored.

The great thing about the Christmas Robot, which is frankly really weird and was found at Cost Plus and consequently was probably made by an eight year old in Thailand, is that it wants to kill you even as it wishes you love, peace and harmony. The internal monologue of the Christmas Robot sounds like this:

peace - and - love - and - KILL! HU-MAN! - and - baby - jesus - DEATH! RAY! - SMASH! - peace - on - earth - good - will - to - KILL! KILL!

The Christmas Robot is terribly conflicted.

47- That's All For This Year
It's New Year's Eve. We're planning on staying home and getting quietly crocked. My New Year's Resolution is to come in low and fast, out of the rising sun. And also, to take it to the next level. I hear people saying that a lot these days: "I'm taking it to the next level!" or "Man! That guy really took it to the next level!"

Whatever there is that is currently a level too low, I will endeavor to take that thing to the next level.

And maybe, well, possibly, I'll try to take this here blog to the next level and actually use Movable Type or something. But I can't promise anything. Honestly, it's more that I won't promise anything, but there you go.

We're closing the hatches and going into silent running mode. There will be no stops for the peeing. Use the coffee can. Pour the runoff into the hole in the dashboard, to fuel the urine-powered engine!

Schneller! Schneller!

Yes, it's true. In a couple of hours we will begin our drive to the bay area for Christmas. Traffic will be hideous. I estimate a 2am arrival. Oh, and it's raining. Did I mention it's raining?

And just to complain about something else here, at work today, people scampered around like freaks handing out little Christmas gifts that, frankly, suck. I got a snowman beanie baby and some candy canes and a giant pencil, none of which I want even a little. The giant pencil fills me with rage. What is it about me that says I want a giant pencil? And now what am I going to do with it? Do you want me to take it into meetings and take notes with my giant pencil, Crazy HR Lady? Is that what you want?

Why do people feel compelled to give gifts to the office at the holidays? When you're giving out these little wastes you're really saying "I bought these in bulk because I worry that I'll be the only person not giving out really awful gifts at work. By the way, I don't really know or like you. Here's a giant pencil."


Anyway, that's enough bitterness. I hope all seven of you have a great Christmas. I'll be spending it with my various families, who I don't get to see enough. Peace to you.