If there ever was a miscarriage of justice (or at least extremely poor market research), this is it.

These are not available in adult sizes.

It’s somewhat musical, right? :)

Everywhere we go-oh!
People wanna know-oh!
Who we are;
Where we come from;
So we tell them,
We’re the experts,
Clever clever experts.

Hah! Read the rest.

Old Pharte realization thunders in when you hear the music of high school and college while shopping for groceries. My neighborhood store has been playing Billy Squier (listen to The Stroke next to the old dude squeezing the tomatoes, anyone?) and other such things that weren’t appropriate 20 and more years ago. Last week they were playing Rush’s Closer to the Heart (yes, I know that it’s older than 20 years but I didn’t discover Rush until college).  What’s amusing about it is also that the OAM and I had watched a special on Rush the previous evening and it took them years to be accepted by other than music geeks, pretty much. Now they are in the grocery store in middle America. You’ve come a long way, baby.

The documentary on Rush (Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage) was good. I don’t often like behind the scenes band type stuff but this was interesting and funny. If you like the band, chances are that you’ve known about this and have been waiting for it to come out, but on the off chance that, like me, you missed hearing it was in the works, check it out.

Meanwhile, here is more Rush. I woke up this morning with the Grace Under Pressure album in my head. Probably my favorite Rush album.

And 180 degrees in the other direction, in case you didn’t see it over at Dustbury, Cee Lo Green’s F**k You. Lyrics on screen and not safe for work. :) CGHill is right. It’s catchy. But I like Gnarls Barkley, so…

We are entering the precious few weeks of the year when I see the sunrise on my way to work instead of the moon.

I love Vegas. I don’t even gamble (well, except for nickel slots to get free watered down drinks). It totally appeals to the magpie in me. Everything is so shiny and tacky and excessive.

A few days ago, Mitchell (aka Enas Yorl) mentioned that Laura would be fun to hang with for the Treasure Island pirate show and such. I think that is an awesome idea!

I have wanted to meet a lot of y’all for a long time now and in Vegas, there is something to entertain everyone if folks don’t hit it off together and you can always find reasonable flights and hotels.

Whaddya say, you folks who hang here? Not like a Moron Meetup from over at Ace’s, not sure what we’d call it, but we’d come up with something I’m sure. ;)

Are you brave/stupid/bored enough to meet your fellow bloggers/commenters in person? January or February in Vegas? :)

* On a related note, and I’ll post again about this closer to time, but if any bloggers/commenters in this lil circle have nothing better to do over Thanksgiving weekend, we’d be happy to host a feed. The last one I did for imaginary internet friends has been a couple years ago. I generally do one for the folks at work but 1) I’m not sure I’ll have a job and 2) I’m not sure I like these folks enough anymore to feed them this year. :)

No one was hurt – I’ll get that out of the way first thing. Secondly, it wasn’t all that bad, but it might have been if the OAM hadn’t woken up from his nap smelling smoke.

I went to Target this afternoon. I forgot I had a kettle on to boil. On high flame, you know, so it would heat faster.

Thirty minutes later the OAM called and told me the kettle was toast and the wall was black.

There are tiny bits of blackened plastic all over the kitchen and dining room. Attic fan has removed most of the smell so far. The spiderwebs in the upper reaches of the vaulted ceiling are nicely highlighted now by the black plastic soot clinging to them. Shit. Now I have to clean that high up.

A month or so ago, our smoke alarm started chirping and wouldn’t stop. There was no place for a battery so we had no idea what to do to stop the noise. It got unplugged from the house and sits in a corner of the computer room, silent. It’s a damn good thing the OAM smelled the smoke and woke up. Tomorrow on the way home – battery operated smoke detector is getting purchased and installed.

And for Phil, yes, I did say it when the OAM called. Video is NSFW.

The OAM emailed me at work on Friday: Can you get out early to catch a movie?

Me: Probably

OAM: 4:35?

Me: Sure

OAM: Meet at theater?

Me: Okey doke

(He comes home past the theater so there really isn’t any reason for him to come home just to turn around. We do that pretty often nowadays.)

I got to the theater around 4:15. He called about 4:20 to say he was stuck in traffic, he’d try to make it on time and he was sorry I was waiting around. Would I go in and see when the movie actually started?

Me: Okay. What are we seeing?

OAM: Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t say? Last Exorcism. I figured you’d want to see it.

Me: No problem. Sounds fine. Call you right back.

I went in and since school has started back up, shows before 5:00 are not ticketed at the normal counter. You get them at the concession stand. There was no one there. I called the OAM and told him I didn’t know, but we’d probably have at least 10 minutes of commercials and previews. He ended up arriving about 4:40. The movie didn’t end up starting until 4:50 – only 2 previews and otherwise, 10 minutes of just commercials. Blech – I hate that trend. If I wanted commercials I would stay home all the time and not DVR anything.

Anyway…on with the movie.

Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently box office returns from 3D movies haven’t been all that lately. The industry expected the wave of future profits to be in 3D because 80% of the Avatar audience saw it in 3D.

Silly industry people.

It was a movie that was made for 3D. The money was spent to showcase the technology. The technology wasn’t a just a delivery vehicle for a movie. Avatar was the technology.

The industry folks are saying no, no, that isn’t true. The reason fewer people are seeing movies in their 3D format is the dearth of 3D capable screens. Oh, and that it’s hard to keep kids wearing the glasses for a whole movie. So they aren’t giving up yet but I sure hope it’s coming.

If you like action movies that aren’t all about explosions give District B13 and District B13 Ultimatum a try. District B13 is available streaming on Netflix and Ultimatum is rentable on iTunes, so you don’t even have to leave the house to go to the video store.

Read the rest of this entry »

CGHill, when commenting over at Sheri’s, led me to search for Big Daddy on YouTube.

I find this stuff really cool – but I love the music of the 1950′s (Sha Na Na was never missed in my house when I was a kid). All the vids seem to be the same series of still photos, though, so there’s no need to watch attentively.

The NRSC is sending a top lawyer to advise Murkowski in the contested Alaska primary. They are framing it as an incumbent requesting assistance as part of an incumbent retention program or some such hogwash.

The advice they give this woman better be to suck it up, wait for a recount and take your lumps graciously if you lose.

For the health of the Republican party, that better be what they tell her.

Anything else, advice on how to game the system in order to win for example, is going to be soooo poorly received by GOP voters it will be unreal. They think their donations suck now, just wait till they are seen as propping up an incumbent who lost a primary.

Seriously, dude. Didn’t they say message received and they were going to stay the hell out of primaries?

Clueless doesn’t even begin to cover it .

Saw it this past weekend. Yes, I was one of the opening weekend horde that made it look like the sequel would be a good idea. I apologize for that.

There have been two reviews I’ve read so far that are pretty well of opposite minds about this movie.

On the negative side, this reviewer calls it an “ugly, inhuman perspective” and waxes on about how modern audiences depress him by cheering at blood, gore and boobage. He thinks people were treated as meat in this movie and the hero was the pack of toothy predators which he feels is an appalling thing.

On the favorable side, this reviewer thought it was surprisingly well done for a B-horror movie and a step up from the 1978 original in direction and cinematography (how it could not be I fail to see). As to the people as meat, women as objects meme, she doesn’t see it. She notes that while “bikinis, boobs and blood” are pretty much required in this genre, the main protagonist is a strong, attractive woman who is never reduced to a sex object.

What I thought was that it was a pretty decent creature feature that didn’t need to be in 3D (like most movies nowadays). I loved the little homages to previous movies of this genre such as Dreyfuss, drunk in a boat singing “Show me the way to go home.” I thought it was surprisingly well shot and directed and it definitely knew it’s target audience. Yes, there was a scene I thought was pretty gratuitous even for this kind of movie but it didn’t make me lose faith in humanity because people laughed at it.(longer post coming later on humanity and inclinations towards violence)

In short, if you like this kind of movie, you’ll like Piranha. If you don’t want to bother with the 3D, there isn’t anything you’ll miss by waiting for a rental. Watch Bats or Eight Legged Freaks or Anaconda while you wait.

Me, I’ll be buying it on dvd so I can put the underwater scene with Kelly Brook and Riley Steele on endless repeat. Billy Zane…that lucky bastard.

Oh, and while I thought it was decent, it’s no Lake Placid.

Panoramic shot of KC from the Liberty Memorial taken by the OAM

(click to embiggen)

Mel over at Big Fat Nerve put up a challenge to post a morning picture of yourself. I’m afraid all you can really tell from this is that my bathroom mirror is pretty disgusting what with all the cat fur and the dust.

And, sad but true story? My look doesn’t improve all that much after I’m ready for work. The hair gets brushed to the other side. The bags under the eyes stay and the general puffiness abates by about midday. Some days when it horrifies me too much I put some makeup on before work. But not often – I’m pretty difficult to horrify. Apathy usually wins.

One year, I decided to buy my mother-in-law a cemetery plot as a Christmas gift. The next year, I didn’t buy her a gift. When she asked me why, I replied, “Well, you still haven’t used the gift I bought you last year!”

And that’s when the fight started…
______________________

My wife and I were watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire while we were in bed.
I turned to her and said, “Do you want to have sex?”
“No,” she answered.
I then said, “Is that your final answer?”
She didn’t even look at me this time, simply saying, “Yes.”
So I said, “Then I’d like to phone a friend.”

And that’s when the fight started…
________________________

My wife and I were sitting at a table at her high school reunion and she kept staring
at a drunken man swigging his drink as he sat alone at a nearby table.
I asked her, “Do you know him?”
“Yes”, she sighed, “He’s my old boyfriend. I understand he took to drinking right after we split up those many years ago, and I hear he hasn’t been sober since.”
“My God!” I said, “Who would think a person could go on celebrating that long?”

And that’s when the fight started…
________________________________

When our lawn mower broke and wouldn’t run my wife kept hinting to me that I should get it fixed. But somehow I always had something else to take care of first: the shed, the boat, making beer… Always something more important to me.

When I arrived home one day, I found her seated in the tall grass, busily snipping away with a tiny pair of sewing scissors. I watched silently for a short time and then went into the house.

I was gone only a minute and when I came out again I handed her a toothbrush. I said,
“When you finish cutting the grass, you might as well sweep the driveway.”

The doctors say I will walk again but I will always have a limp.
________________________________

My wife sat down next to me as I was flipping channels.
She asked, “What’s on the TV?”
I said, “Dust.”

And that’s when the fight started…
________________________________
Saturday morning I got up early, quietly dressed, made my lunch, and slipped quietly into the garage. I hooked up the boat to the van and proceeded to back out into a torrential downpour. The wind was blowing 50 mph so I pulled back into the garage, turned on the radio and discovered that the weather would be bad all day. I went back into the house, quietly undressed and slipped back into bed.

I cuddled up to my wife’s back, now with a different anticipation, and whispered,
“The weather out there is terrible.”

My loving wife of 5 years replied, “And can you believe my stupid husband is out fishing in that?”

And that’s when the fight started…
________________________________

My wife was hinting about what she wanted for our upcoming anniversary.
She said, “I want something shiny that goes from 0 to 150 in about 3 seconds.”

I bought her a bathroom scale.

And that’s when the fight started…
________________________________

My wife was standing nude, looking in the bedroom mirror.
She was not happy with what she saw and said to me, “I feel horrible. I look old, fat and ugly. I really need you to pay me a compliment.”

I replied, “Your eyesight is damn near perfect.”

And that’s when the fight started…