Your daily dose of Vitamin T

I'm done here...

2010-11-19T10:32:00.000-05:00

I finally got my own website (again) so all future blogs will be there. Thanks, blogspot: it's been a heckuva ride.

www.Tony-MacKenzie.com

"Don't forget the dash!"

Movie Muhfriday - The Social Network - 9-out-of-10 T's

2010-10-29T10:41:00.006-04:00

Snarky Title - Facebook: Origins

For those who don't know the plot of TSN (my handy abbreviation), my snarky title pretty much sums it up: It's a movie about the beginnings of the Internet Phenomenon known as Facebook.

I don't know how much of the film is based in fact, other than that the main character is a buttwad. From the little I've seen of Mark Zuckerberg (the guy who created Facebook) which is a few years old at best, he seems like a pretentious jerk... but you know what? He changed the world. My MOM is on Facebook. That's how much he altered our day to day lives. Also? He's the youngest billionaire (with a "b") on the planet. I think he's earned his pretentious jerkiness, so I'll let him have it.

Uhh... thanks?

The movie takes him from a sophomore in college at one of those preppy schools I didn't go to (Harvard, I believe) to the CEO of a company that, again, altered the face of the Internet, and by extension the World.

Cast - 9-out-of-10 mini t's

The cast did a stellar job. No bones about it, they acted the crap out of this script. We'll focus on the lead: Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg.

The pic isn't from this movie, but
he doesn't really change his face to it'll do.

I wasn't really impressed with Eisenberg in Adventureland (mostly because I wasn't impressed by Adventureland, it wasn't my cuppatea), and I kind of figured he was just another Michael Cera: awkward kid, fast talker, THE END. Then Zombieland happened, and I was surprised: he rocked that role. Still the awkward fast-talker, but of a different sort. Now, I've seen TSN, and he's won me over: this dude is awesome.

AWESOME

In this movie, he plays the pretentious jerkwad, but he does it in a way that I'm rooting for him. Even when he's eventually doing the thing that gets him sued by his best friend, I understand why. I don't approve, but I still like the guy. And doing that, playing the douche and doing so in a way that the audience still likes you, is a tough thing to do, but he pulled it off.

The Rest of The Cast

MY HAIR IS HUUUUUUGE

Andrew Garfield plays Zuckerberg's best friend, and is going to be Peter Parker in the next Spider-Man movie. Anyone who's read this blog for a while knows I loves me my comicbook movies, and the only other thing I'd seen Garfield in was "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus", and he did fine, but I wasn't crazy about the film so I wasn't sure about him. Those fears are now put to rest. His American accent is flawless, he's got the chops... the only thing I'm worried about now is that he might be too old. He's like 27 now, and he's playing Spider-Man in High School. Hmm.

Justin Timberlake won me over in Black Snake Moan four years ago, so I knew he'd be fine. Here, he's the guy that invented Napster back in the day, and he very successfully plays a less-successfully-likable douchebag. He does good. Not much more to say.

The rest were fine. They did their jobs. The guy who played the twin preppy row-boaters that claimed Zuckerberg stole Facebook from them had some great lines. "I want to kick his @$: I'm 6'5", 220, and there are two of me!" The only girl that Zuckerberg cares about through the film leaves a lasting impression. High fives all around.

Story - 8-out-of-10 mini t's

How enjoyable can a movie about programming be? Apparently, pretty enjoyable. The dialogue was fantastic, and the story shows how a college undergrad goes about making the coolest thing on the internet. It explains his thought process, and does so in a way that (if you're familiar with Facebook) makes you go "Ooooooh" when you see how they came up with the different features. I don't know that there were any dead-weight characters.

All those blurry people? Important.

There was a beginning, middle, and end to this movie, even though there was a lot of jumping around (flashbacks, flashforwards). It all worked. I don't really have any improvements in mind, since the story is based on fact: real life is tough to effectively criticize. According to various interviews, most of the stuff in the film is made up, but I DON'T CARE, cause it was fun to watch. So there.

Director - 8-out-of-10 mini t's

The jumping around in time was great. It explained the various lawsuits by telling the story behind them, and while this is not a groundbreaking bit of directorial goodness, it got the job done and did so well. The pallete, the range of colors for the film was kind of dark, but not unnecessarily so. I found out after the fact that David Fincher, the Director, also directed Se7en and Fight Club, which doesn't surprise me in the least. The only surprise is that he'd jump from those kinds of stories to this kind... and I'm glad he did.

General Enjoyment - 9-out-of-10 mini t's

This picture made me laugh.

I had a blast. As I said in the Cast section, Eisenberg is known for his fast-talkiness, which seemed to spread virus-like through the rest of the film and it took me a second to get my brain in gear with the fast pace that everything was taking. Once I did, I loved it. This was a very enjoyable film. There was comedy, drama, great acting, excellent directing, the story kept me engaged, and all together they worked like a dream. This is a great film. If you haven't seen it yet, you should probably get on that.

So, now that that's over: how's this rating system? Too much? Too little? I throw myself at your mercy, dear readers. In the immortal words of those Superbowl Commercial guys: Whazzup?

Movie Grading Scale REVISITED

2010-10-27T09:48:00.003-04:00

I've decided to view my grading scale as something that is constantly evolving. The finished product will always be in the header, and will remain on the BLANK-out-of-10 scale, but how it gets to that scale needs to be something more than just "Oop, that was a hoot, NINE T'S!" on my end. So sayeth me.

Why?

That's why.

So here's how it will work: four (for right now at least) mini categories that will be on the mini-t scale. I will add up the total of mini-t's and then divide by the number of categories. Each category is worth 10 mini-t's, each mostly independent of the others. Aaaaaand here are your categories:

Cast - 10-mini-t's

How did they do? Did I believe them? Where they enjoyable? Did they perform their craft with gusto and fervor, or did they phone their performances in?

Story - 10-mini-t's

Was it a good story? Did I willingly suspend my disbelief, or did it engage me in spite of the actors and director?

Director - 10-mini-t's

How did he do? Did he take the components above and utilize them fully? Anything particularly visionary in his approach?

General Enjoyability - 10-mini-t's

This scene was awesome...

This is a little tougher to nail down: it's my wild card. If I liked the movie, in spite of my self, this is where it will come through. If everything was terrible, but there was SOMETHING, something I can't really quantify that made me like it, this is where it will show. On the flip side, if the above were all great but the finished film just doesn't jibe, becoming something less than the sum of it's parts, that'll show here too.

Final Grade: Cast+Story+Director+General Enjoyability/four=number of T's

So there you go. We'll see how it works out.

I like it with a hint of something impossible

2010-10-12T11:11:00.009-04:00

When it comes to entertainment, I need mine with a little extra "oomph". That "oomph" can come in many forms, but it needs to be present. It's like salt on a steak, or a dash of cinnamon on your french toast: something small just pushes whatever it is that I'm enjoying over the edge into the realm of edge-of-your-seat awesomeness.

Lemme 'splain.

I read "The Maltese Falcon" a few months ago. It's largely considered to be the greatest private-detective novel of all time, and was later turned into one of the greatest hard-boiled detective movies ever, starring Humphrey Bogart. Great book, great movie.

Seriously. Check it out.

But I definitely didn't enjoy it as much as I enjoy "The Dresden Files"...

Detective novels, but the guy's also a wizard

...or "The Automatic Detective".

A detective novel, but the guy's also a robot

Do you see where I'm going with this? The oomph I require to take a form of entertainment from "Yeah, it was good" to "Holy crap, that was awesome" is something out of the ordinary, and also probably impossible. I first noticed it years ago on the Nintendo64:

*insert angel choir here*

This rightchere was one of the greatest game systems of all time. It was the first, and also the last, time that my entire family sat down and got seriously into the business of playing each other at a video game:

Welcome to Mario Kart!

Oh, the fun we had. But it isn't Mario Kart that I want to talk about here. No, I want to talk about the game that is considered to be the greatest First Person Shooter game of all time. Yes, I'm talking about GoldenEye.

It was also a movie!

It wasn't the first FPS (that honor goes to something else that I've never played and don't know the name of... maybe Wolfenstein or something), but it was the best, and because it got in on the genre early and was just really really good, it's like the grandfather of the genre that now includes HALO and Gears of War and Modern Warfare: basically, GoldenEye did it right, and became what other FPSes aspire to.

Me? I could take it or leave it.

Meh

While my brother and his friends were playing that, I was playing Legend of Zelda and Banjo-Kazooie. GoldenEye just didn't appeal to me, and I assumed that that meant all FPSes were equally unappealing.

Then, Banjo-Kazooie got a sequel: Banjo-Tooie...

Worst name in video game history, but a decent game

... and Banjo-Tooie had a FPS mode.

Hubbuh-wha?

It's a bear shooting with a bird!

And I enjoyed the crap out of that. That's when it hit me: I needs my entertainment with a dose of the weird. As much as I love shooting Nazis in WWII...

And who doesn't?

... I'd much rather shoot aliens in WWII!

SIGN ME UP FOR THAT CRAP!

The reason I'm blogging about it is because I just finished a book called "The Starter", which is the second in a series by a guy named Scott Sigler.

Pope Silgerissimo the Umpteenth is a writer (obviously), but he was having trouble finding a publisher. So, he decided to record himself reading his book, then give the result away for free over the Intertubes. The response was flabbergasting.

Now, Da Sigster is a New York Times bestselling author, and he's still giving his books away for free online. By way of saying "Thanks for the Free Books", his fans (called "junkies", cause we's always jonesin' our Sigler-fix) then buy the books so he'll keep writing more. It's a cool system, and it's working.

Way to go, dudenstein

So, back to the Starter: it's about football.

"But Tony," you're asking, "where's the flavor? Wheres the dash of crazy that you love?" And I'll tell you:

It's football... IN THE FUTURE.

ooooOOOOOOoooooooooo! (Image from here)

And there are aliens who play the game as well. After years of galactic war, humanity and all the other fighting races have been conquered, and to appease the masses and promote inter-species harmony, our conquering overlords have created a Galactic Football League. It's a good read.

The point is, I'm not crazy about boring ol' football. I could care less about the Super-, Sugar-, Soup-Bowls. But you add in a bunch of aliens? It's on like Donkey Kong.

YEAH (Image here)

All that said, I still won't read "The Time Traveler's Wife". I don't care how much salt you put on it, to me that sucker looks like ham, and I can't stand ham.

And the movie looked creepy.

T-MACK OUT.

Tony goes to the Ren Fest!

2010-10-11T14:12:00.006-04:00

I love the Renaissance Festival. And since you're here reading this, you probably care about "why" I love the Ren Fest, so I'll tell you.

I love the food

I love games

I love the people in costume

And, of course, the eye candy is nice, too

I went to the Renaissance Festival last Sunday and had a great time, which ought to tell you a bit about the kind of person I am. The day started out with glorious sleeping in. It's the rare Sunday that I skip church, but we were leaving at around the same time services were just getting into the swing of things, so there wasn't really a point to going.

I assume God likes the Ren Fest too, so I'm sure he understood.

After the sleeping in, I pulled out my kilt, which I haven't worn since commencement at college (I'm sure my folks sure were proud of their oldest son as he accepted his diploma to the sound of an auditorium full of laughter) and ironed the wrinkles out. Clutching my freshly printed tickets I piled into my car and went to pick up some pals. Here's the crew manifest:

Captain (Me)
First Mate (a good friend)
Ship's Physician (Mom)
The pretty one that serves no purpose (my sister)
Random Crew *expendable* (Sister's boyfriend, 3 more of my friends)

For those of you counting at home, that's 8 people along for the ride. Awright.

When we finally get there about an hour and a half later, I'm beginning to question if the kilt was the best idea: it's frickin' cold out. But by the time I walk through the parking lot and get to the main gate, my legs are either numb or my Scottish Heritage gives me a +5 racial bonus against cold damage; regardless, I feel fine, and I can tell this is gonna be a good day.

Oh yeah: good to go

We get to the gate (which looks like a castle) and we get inside, immediately to be surrounded by people in period dress from nearly every era and : Victorian/Elizabethan England, Ancient to more Modern Scotland, vikings, there was a dude dressed as the Pope... it was awesome.

They had projectile-and-thrown weapon games as well, but you had to pay for them with RenFest money, which they sold to you in increments of $5. All the games cost RF$3. If you're doing the math, you need to buy $15 worth just so you wouldn't take the useless RFDollars home. Oh, they's sneaky.

So I bought some RFBucks, and tried every game they had: bows and arrows (that were made for tiny people, not sexy frost-resistant behemoths like myself), tiny throwing knives, big throwing knives, ninja stars, spears, and my personal favorite: throwing axes.

Like this, but less potential for murder

That's better

I nailed the target right betwixt the eyes (it was a longhorn outline painted on a wall). It was beautiful. Sure, I missed the first 4 throws, but the upside to throwing axes is that even if you don't get the axey-part to stick, you did just throw a 5 pound weight-on-a-stick at them, and they're probably unconscious and ready to be dispatched at your leisure.

The only downside for the entire day was the food I got: I bought the giant turkey leg.

It's tradition

... and it sucked. It was terrible. It tasted like ham. If I wanted ham, I would have got the ham, but I don't like ham: that's why I bought the turkey leg. Graaah.

But that was the only problem. If you've never been, you should check it out because the Ren Fest is a hoot and a half.

Movie MuhFriday: Legend of the Guardians - 7-out-of-10 T's

2010-09-24T13:19:00.003-04:00

I've been kind of lax in my reviewing of late (because I haven't seen anything that wasn't over a month old)... so here's a link to my reviewing scale just as a refresher. Check that crap out.

Now that that's out of the way, we'll get a few other things out of the way: The Guardians of Ga'hoole is a book series for children. They're like 3rd-grade reading level chapter books, the kind of thing you give a kid who's too young for Harry Potter, but too old for the Berenstain Bears. (I haven't spoken the words "Berenstain Bears" in over 10 years, and now it feels simultaneously strange and familiar on my tongue.) So here's what we're getting out of the way:

1. The books were better.

2. If you enjoy pretty things, this movie will make you poop.

Cue elaboration!

When I first saw the preview for this movie, I was dazzled. The pretty flying scenes coupled with the epic music gave me shivers. They put those trailers together RIGHT. Way to go. After that, I did my research and found out about the book series: there's like 15 of them. The movie is apparently based on the first 3 books, so I got them from the library (venturing for the first time in years into the "Children's Section"), and devoured them in a weekend at work.

It was a slow weekend.

They's good books. If I were in the 3rd grade, I'd be all over that, but I'm not, so I trudged through the poop-jokes and got into the deeper narrative about a war between the good owls (the Allied Powers) and the bad owls (the Nazis). Epic stuff for a 3rd grade book.

Almost as epic as this kid.

Fast forward to last night when I watched the movie: they hit the important bits. All the characters are there, even if they don't get the same amount of "screen" time that they did in the books. They combined two of the Guardian's enemies into the same faction, something that I totally understand for reasons of time. In fact, every change they made, I completely "get" the reasoning behind (except for this weird echidna-oracle thing, he seemed kind of pointless). The two things I wish would have been different were the training montage and the credits.

I hate training montages. I think they're the reason America is so fat: because we've been watching the heroes in movies go from weak-to-fighting-shape in a five-minute musical montage since we were born, but that's another blog post entirely. More time spent on their training would have been awesome. As for the credits, it's like this shadow-puppet paper-owl thing that makes the owls look clumsy and stiff and stupid, which is such a weird feeling after seeing them become excellent fliers and arial acrobats.

This movie could have been better, but examples like The Golden Compass, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Legend of the Seeker (or whatever that movie was called), they show how crappy these adaptations can be. This is not a crappy adaptation. It could have been better, yes. But it could have been a whole lot worse.

AAAAAHHHHHH WWWHHHHHYYYYYYYYY???!!!

And, on the extremely positive side, this film is completely beautiful to behold. I got to watch it for the frees, but the next time I get a few hours I'm going to go someplace nice with 3D glasses and gladly pay to see it.

Oh, one more thing: the band/solo music artist Owl City is part of the soundtrack. I groaned.

This pic is unrelated, but I kind of love it.

It's a good song, but it plays during the movie when there should have been epic orchestral music or something, and this guy with his synthesizers just took me completely out of it.

So, anyway, good movie. Take the kids. Or, if you like watching pretty things (and I know I do!), go yourself. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

America fights pirates!

2010-09-20T09:36:00.004-04:00

Have you guys seen this? Make with the clickity click and check that crap out.

Welcome back. Have some hot chocolate.

Not what I meant, but this is what showed up on Google

In case you didn't clicky click and read that link (shame on you, there's even a video), it was about those Somali Pirate guys who have been getting headlines recently. What they did a few weeks ago was take over a German ship, and do their usual thing: take hostages, demand ransoms, and sell the stuff, then go home to their Somali babies and wives and do the whole thing again tomorrow.

It's a living.

EXCEPT that didn't happen at all because a.) The hostages refused to be taken (way to go guys!) and b.) because the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit's Maritime Raid Force with the USS Dubuque were in the area and itchin' to go!

SEMPER FI, SON!

24 highly trained Marines boarded the ship, something that was made possible by the fact that the "hostages" had locked themselves in a safe room. At the go-ahead on the Secretary of Defense, the Marines boarded and accepted the surrender of the pirates "within minutes" said a Navy spokesman. No shots were fired.

This is the first such action the U.S. has taken in response to these pirates. You know, real pirates, not a 12 year old kid with an Internet connection and a CD burner.

Does this address the greater problem of why these pirates are in existence in the first place? Namely Somalia's poor economic condition which arguably led these men, with no other options, into the piracy trade?

No. No it doesn't.

What it does do is just be really freakin' awesome, because America is again in the pirate-fightin' business.

Awright!

I'm worried about how much this appeals to me

2010-09-10T11:45:00.004-04:00

Tiny houses. The number that's being tossed around on the websites is $20,000, which means that's probably lowballing, and others on the page cost around $50,000. What's amazing is that they can fit in my parent's garage.

This guy's name is Jay Schafer, and he's been living in one of the tiny houses he builds for over a decade. His electric and heating bill's are around $20 each, I think, and his home is 89-square feet. Others have as much as 800-sq feet, but that's still pretty tiny in comparison to some of the guys you find in real-estate magazines.

This guy took Thoreau's "simplify, simplify" and drove past its logical extreme about half a state ago. Still, he's happy. And he makes some good points.

Click here to see some more pics of the inside of one.

The houses have everything: kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, living rooms... it's just some of them pull double, or triple, duty.

I doubt many of these homes have much resale value, but the idea still has it's appeal: you have what you need. I'm a single guy with a limited income who's only home to sleep anyway: I might as well have a place that's mine, instead of paying $blankhundred a month in rent.

This is an idea I'm going to kick around for a bit.

And now for something healthy and nutritious

2010-09-07T13:39:00.005-04:00

So, there's this mental block I've got to get past that insists to me that everything I post needs to be this big production. That is not the case. So here's something silly and cool.

Yeah, those are carrots.

Baby Carrots are not in fact "baby carrots". They're regular, full-grown carrots cut up into bite-sized portions of carroty goodness. The notion of baby carrots has been around since about the 1980's, when America's carrot producers figured they'd cash in on American's desire to eat the young of other species (examples include veal, eggs, bean sprouts, and baby carrot's distant cousin, baby corn).

Adorable AND delicious!

It was an unmitigated success, and now the carrot industry earns around $1 billion a year. Unfortunately for carrot farmers, sales have tapered off in the last few years, and they've decided to try and update their image.

Holy crap, I want some carrots now

This is brilliant. It's a "Got Milk" campaign for carrots. It's literally a "New Look, Same Great Taste" kind of thing, but it's for something that's actually good for you. How awesome is that?

PRETTY FRIKKIN' AWESOME!

They're putting carrots in vending machines at school, working on commercials, they've got a website...

And this chick, whoever the crap she is

This whole idea is the kind of tongue-in-cheek that really makes me smile, and the sincerity behind the idea (yeah, it's a business, but it's for a product that's actually good for you) makes that smile all the broader.

Way to go, carrot guys. Way to go.

HIGH FIVE!

Movie Muhwednesday: The Expendables - 7-out-of-10 T's

2010-08-25T12:18:00.004-04:00

Lets play a game: I'll name a restaurant, and you'll say what you'd get if you went there.

Fazoli's

You'll probably say something like "the lasagna", or "chicken fetuccini". You're less likely to order the steak.

Texas Roadhouse

Flipping that situation, you'd maybe say "a t-bone" or "the sirloin". Probably not the lasagna.

That thinking is why I'm flabbergasted when I see that The Expendables has a 39% on Rotten Tomatoes.

What the crap, guys?

When I go to a restaurant, I get what that restaurant is good at. When I go to a movie, I want to see what the filmmakers are good at. If I don't want lasagna, I won't go to Fazoli's; if I don't want to see Dolph Lundren blow a pirate in half in the first five minutes of a movie, I'm not going to go see The Expendables.

But I did want to see that, and I was not disappointed.

The Expendables could have been better, yes, but it was hardly a disappointment because I knew what I was in for. What I wanted was crazy, mind bending explosions and fist fights between the action heroes of my childhood and adolescence. What I wanted was Terry Crews wielding a tommy gun-shotgun that fired exploding rounds and blew up bad guys.

Delivered

What I wanted was to see Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren on screen together again for the first time in 25 years.

Delivered

I wanted to see Jet Li shoot people in the face while being all short and Asian and kung-fooey.

Delivered

And I wanted to see Jason Statham throw knives through people.

Frikkin' delivered

We were never promised anything but that. This movie was not supposed to be Bourne Identity-complicated, or full of Rocky 1-and-2 character development. This was supposed to be a movie full of good guys, bad guys, a beautiful woman or two, and punching.

Lots and lots of punching.

This movie was fun. I have a little problem with SPOILER IN INVISO-TEXT!!! the name because none of the guys actually die, bringing their actual expendability in to question END SPOILER!!!, but that's really minor. I paid to see it twice, and I'm going to buy this movie when it's BluRayified.

Misadventures with my new phone

2010-08-18T11:00:00.005-04:00

(This is my latest column, cut'n'pasted right here. Have some of you already read it? Probably, but it's content and I can easily convince myself that it counts. Woot.)

In one of my more pitiful moments of succumbing to peer pressure, I got myself a new phone, and in an effort to avoid sounding like I’m being paid by a particular company to write this glowing review, we shall call it… a Lloyd. A Fotorola Lloyd.

Just go with it.

I walk into my other job last week and one of my underlings shows me his new phone, which he bought out of necessity, predicated by him washing his hands… while still holding his old phone. He’s a silly lad.

Anyway, he shows me his Lloyd. I see the apps [little things you can download that do stuff as pointless as, say, pretending to be an Etch-a-Sketch or making Star-Warsian lightsaber noises, and can be as useful as acting as a Global Positioning System to give you directions or telling you where to find Mars in the night sky (one of my favorites)], and upon viewing everything the little guy can do, I immediately go out and purchase one. It’s only an extra 30 bucks a month to get unlimited Internet and everything else this fella can do, and with my various available upgrades for being a loyal customer, Shmerizon (my service provider) only charged me $50 of the original $250 to get the actual phone.

I’m on Cloud 9. I’ve got Internet radio that plays songs I actually like, the previously mentioned unlimited Interwebs so I can look up stuff on the fly, it acts as a portable modem that I can plug in to my laptop for when I want to use an actual computer-shaped-computer instead of a Lloyd-shaped one, it has a level (for making things level!), a compass, email, weather updates, a button I can press that gives out a quick “badump-tish!” whenever I tell a joke, a flashlight, a small zen garden, a camera, and it shows me how to tie the best Half-Windsor I’ve ever had the pleasure of looping around my neck. It is also, wonder of wonders, a phone.

It’s a Swiss Army knife that I can upgrade to my heart’s content… only not, because it doesn’t actually have a knifey part, or the bottle opener, or screw drivers. But that’s why I carry a multi-tool. Apples and oranges, that comparison was.

But you get the point.

The only problem I’ve had with it, and here we finally get to the reason I’m writing this thing, is that I can’t figure out the dad-blamed, flag-nabbited, thrice-darned alarm clock.

I know, right? The alarm clock is something we’ve pretty much had mastered for well over a century. My phone can do everything in the world except wake me up when I want it to.

WHAT THE BALLS, LLOYD?

It started out promising enough. It comes with an alarm clock that actually did it’s job, but… ugh. The offered noises it makes do exactly what they’re supposed to: they wake you up, but sound like those really annoying not-quite-digital alarms from the 70’s and 80’s with flip down numbers that sound like someone’s beating the crap out of a cricket-filled-rooster. Not the most pleasant thing to awaken too. Then I saw that it had an actual rooster-crowing noise. That’s kinda cool. I’ll try that.

WHY? WHAT WAS I THINKING?!

Yeah, it woke me up. And then I couldn’t turn the stupid thing off. So I’ve got this crowing phone that won’t shut up at 8 a.m. and it’s incredibly loud. I’m surprised the neighbors didn’t complain. Here’s me, pounding the button that says “Alarm Off” but it’s NOT TURNING OFF and it’s still crowing!

It was here that I determined an actual rooster would be better to have for this purpose, for two reasons: one, in the movies, the rooster turns off by itself after a single crow. No buttons that refuse to deactivate it, it just gets the crow out of it’s system, wakes everyone up, then saunters off ‘til tomorrow. Two, you can smother a rooster by stuffing it under a pillow. Where a rooster would run out of breath, my phone has no such weakness.

So here’s me, crowing phone stuffed under a pillow, slowly working the cotton candy out of my brain, and I decide to risk taking it out to try and figure out how to shut the thing off. Then I see a little message: “Awake? Prove it:” and it has a number and a little key pad.

I HAVE TO ENTER A COMBINATION TO TURN OFF MY ALARM.

I enter the combo, shut the rooster up, and delete that alarm with more haste than I thought I was capable of at 8:05 a.m. I look for a new one in the app store, an alarm sans-combo lock, and find one. I’ll try that out.

It wakes me up at midnight, then refuses to wake me up in the morning. What the crap?

I’m currently on my 5th alarm app. I’ve found one that doesn’t suck, and actually does what it’s supposed to without making me jump through hoops to turn it off. And it sounds nice. I’ll keep you informed.

On a completely different note, why did Tony cross the road? I don’t actually care, I just wanted to do this with my new phone: *badump-tish!*

COMING SOON TO VITAMIN T!

Reviews for SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD and THE EXPENDABLES!

The Greatest Movie Trilogy of All Time!

Raised by TV, Episode 2: Cartoons!

Stay tuned for these updates and more, since Tony will soon have free time!

The Other Guys - 8-out-of-10 T's

2010-08-06T11:22:00.003-04:00

I laughed... very hard at this movie. I don't really know what else to say other than that it has moments in it where I was laughing so hard I was glad that the only people in the theater with me were my employees and and their friends/family, and if they say anything about me laughing too hard I could immediately terminate them with Extreme Prejudice (the name of my whiffle bat).

Ain't she perty?

Just... watch this movie. It isn't as funny as it's predecessors (Anchor Man, Talladega Nights), but those films are kind of like... they're like Mom's meatloaf. We've had them for so long that they've entered into what we consider to be the perfect example of the genre (in one case "The Funny Movie" and in the other "the Bestest Meatloaf Ever"). So my point is that with time it will mature, enter the public consciousness, and join it's brothers in the realm of Classic Comedy. It still isn't as good as Anchorman, but that's like saying my porterhouse isn't as good as that filet mignon: it's still a freaking steak, and this movie is still hilarious.

Highly recommended.

Soooo close they can taste it

2010-08-04T09:53:00.001-04:00

These things can never be easy, can they?

The results of last night's special election instill me with a glimmer of hope for our fair burg: the vote for the school bond issue, while not the landslide "YES!" I was hoping for, was also not the landslide "NO!" of the previous times the bond was on the ballot.

Instead of a 14-or-so percent margin, it's a margin of about 1.5 percent. It's still a margin saying "no", but it's also not the final word on the subject as not all the votes are in.

There are 136 provisional votes on their way in. The yea's and nay's are so close that these provisional votes can tip the scale back to the yea-side. Here's some math:

2698 votes for (49.27 percent)

2778 votes against (50.73 percent)

Of the available 136 votes left, the yea side needs to get 109 (if my figgerin' is correct) of those votes to win by a whopping margin of 1 vote.

If that happens, or heck, even if it doesn't, there will be a recount, which is standard procedure when a vote comes down to a margin of half a percent.

I give you that math to drive my point home: 50 percent (rounding up) of the voting people in Greenville recognize the need for this school and are willing to do something about it. That's so much better than the last two times we tried. I just hope that when these final votes come in, it's 51 percent who care... because that's all that really matters.

Here's hoping.

Mah schedule

2010-08-03T11:28:00.005-04:00

Soooo I'm busy. Like, seriously, I'm a busy guy. You have no idea. What did you do today?

Really? Awesome.

Me? Oh, I saved a kitten from a tree...

This one.

... then I delivered a baby in an elevator...

Not this one, but they're babies and they all look the same so you get the idea.

... and invented the Flux Capacitor, which makes time travel possible.

1.21 JIGGAWATTS!

And that's why I haven't been blogging.

Recently found out that once the Great Darke County Fair rolls around, one of my jobs is closed (the theater) and the other can survive without me for a few days, so I'm going on vacation.

GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS FTW!!!

There will be hiking and rafting and ziplining and bear-wrestling and I'mma bring a bobcat named Charlie home with me and we'll be friends forever. That's my plan.

All of this means: come September, I will be refreshed and reacquainted with my old friend "free time", so I'll be refilling the ol' culture tank so these blogs happen more than once every two weeks. Like, you know, I said wouldn't happen a few blogs ago.

Whoops.

Stay classy, Earth.

I'm old fashioned that way

2010-07-22T12:07:00.002-04:00

I should have been born a cowboy, or in time for WWII. Back when you could punch people for being an idiot, or rude... or looking at you funny... or cause you wanted to punch them. And nobody thought twice!

I've never been good with bullies. I understand them, but my Christian-upbringing, combined with my steady diet of superhero comics, soon erased any possibility of me ever being one.

I got spanked as a kid. I was not abused, as so many people nowadays believe spanking to be synonymous with, but when I misbehaved extraordinarily, I was punished in a manner accordingly, and in a way that my young mind could easily understand.

Kids don't understand ethics. They are biologically incapable of giving two craps about anyone that isn't themselves. That's science. But what I did understand was pain. Not thumbscrews, but a whack on the bottom.

"Throwing a tantrum because mom didn't buy the Doublestuf Oreos will result in a spanking? Then perhaps I shouldn't throw a tantrum."

DING.

BAM. Goal achieved. Ethics came later, when my brain was developed enough to handle them. In the meantime, I'm not being a nuisance to my mom and the other people in Krogers.

"Shut that kid up or I'll do it for you."

Now, though, I've got to fight the notion that a sock to the jaw (or two, or a dozen) isn't exactly what some people need. Not because of the spankings, but the comics, and TV. You watch these justice shows that are all about doing things within the law... but you don't feel right until the main character plants some sweet chin music on the guy that steals from grannys.

I love the sound of sweet chin music.

But, I fight that urge because I appreciate our legal system. Is it a good system? No. Is it the best system? Yes.

Still, I hate people that say stuff about "an eye for an eye would leave everyone blind". That's straight up the dumbest thing I've ever heard: it's supposed to be a warning. How many people would you go around plucking the eyes out of if you knew you'd lose one yourself? Probably not many. (Definitely no more than two.)

Still, barring that, there are more mature ways to handle things... but that sweet chin music still holds it's appeal.

Trust me

2010-07-21T12:21:00.000-04:00

Few things get the blood pumping like a personal attack.

I wasn't good at the game of High School. Even though I was in theater, "drama" never appealed to me, and the hobby of backstabbing isn't something I was every very interested in. I don't know if it's because I'm just not that kind of person (I hope that's the case) or if I'm just not biologically wired to want to make someone look bad. Kind of like how some people are good at certain sports: I doubt Matt Light would be any good at, say, pole vaulting.

As for me, I can't say I'd be any good at pole vaulting either. I'm also not sneaky: I'd make a terrible ninja. My idea of stealth is standing still long enough for people to forget I'm there, then surprising them with all the devastation of an earthquake. That's me: sneaky like a continent.

I don't know if you heard (or even care) about it, but recently someone called one of my articles into question. They picked a quote, said it wasn't true, then pretty much bashed me to the entire internet. The funny thing was, they're partially right; not in this case, but in general.

Try listening to someone giving a speech, or even in your next conversation. Very rarely does anyone start saying something and get directly to the point. There are "ums" and "ahs" and tangents and interruptions and flies buzzing around that need swatted. You don't want to read that in an article.

"I, uh, I want to thank you, um, all of you for *dodges mosquito* GAH, uh, all of you for being here, and for... *pause, tracking mosquito with eyes* for... *SMACK* GOT HIM! ... uh, for being here today."

No. We'd never get anything done here if we did that, if we quoted everyone completely, 100 percent verbatim. But neither do we, do I, put words in people's mouths. I am not in the habit of making up quotes. I'd be a pretty poor excuse for a reporter if I did that. But I will shorten things down so you don't look like a moron.

"I want to thank all of you for being here today."

That's a pretty extreme example. Another is the tangent, when people are reminded of something in the middle of their point and start to wander into the realm of the "what the heck" before meandering back to what they were trying to say. We don't have enough ink to do that.

My point is, you can trust me. If I do an article about you or something you care about, you can trust that I'm going to do my best on it. I am not going to lie to you about anything: it's not in my nature. When you talk to me, I will do my best to get your point across, even if you don't do that good a job yourself because of, say, a mosquito. I'm not in the business of making people look bad: I'm in the business of reporting the news.

And, so help me, if you have a problem with something I do, come to me. ME. Not the internet, not the people around you, and I'll try to fix it.

I'm no good at politics. That might come around to bite me some day, when someone who IS successfully ruins me behind my back when I'm busy getting ready to quake the earth... but if that is the case, I'll cling to this: I gave you my best. And I figure that's all anyone can ask for.

Movie Muhfriday: Inception - 9-out-of-10 T's

2010-07-16T11:17:00.003-04:00

This movie is Christopher Nolan's reward for being awesome. And the best part is we reap many of the benefits. Lemme 'splain.

Christopher Nolan is the Director of "Inception". He also directed such Hollywood Blockbusters as, oh, "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight", and something that has a cult following because it's awesome, "Memento". These films were admittedly two of the most baddest-assiest things to ever be committed to film ever, and they made Warner Brothers 17-jillion metric crap-loads of money. As a reward for their crap-loads of cash, they were all like, "Sure, Chris, go do something fun before you do Batman 3 and re-reboot the Superman franchise (true story) for us."

He did good, he earned their trust, he gets the funding to do what he wants. And boyohboy, does he have some fun with it.

Just look at all that fun.

Inception is brilliant. It's a story with so many freaking layers that if you're not engaged the entire time you will get lost SO BAD, but it's so pretty and so much fun that you don't even mind because you WANT to be involved. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen.

One of the things I love about this is that I really had no idea what the plot was before I went in, and I'll do my darnedest not to ruin it for you. The ad-campaign for this film was... not exactly misleading, but it only gave you a taste of what was going to happen. It has to do with dreams, and the people in the movie go into other people's heads to mess with those dreams and get information.

I can't... I can't really straight up review this like I want to, as I have neither the time to do so, or, as stated, the desire to mess with what they've done. Let's just say that this is something you need to see. Probably more than once. And therein lies my single, solitary issue with this film: you need to see it more than once.

The average movie-goer is used to spoon feeding, and here you kind of have to work for what you're watching. Not that it's difficult, but there is so much going on that unless you're some kind of superhuman, you'll need to see it twice just to process it. I have no problem with that, and I'm totally going to see it again, but I work at a theater so I can do that. Joe Blow on the street probably isn't going to want to fork over another $10 to see it again, and might leave without completely understanding what he just saw.

This is minor. I don't mind. But that's why Nolan hasn't created a perfect film: you need to see it twice. Again, not that I mind, but average-movie-goer-person might.

If I hadn't sworn off decimal points, this would be a 9.9-out-of-10. But I did, so it isn't.

Watch this as soon as possible if you love thinker-movies. I loved this.

The Hetero Man-Crush

2010-07-14T12:14:00.005-04:00

You have one. Don't even try to deny it. You might be able to if you don't know what it is, but you have one even then. If you didn't know the word 'pancreas' it wouldn't matter because you have one anyway. And just like in High School Biology when you first learned and then forgot what your pancreas does, I'm here to learn ya.

The Hetero Man-Crush is exactly that: an entirely platonic crush, which means no matter what the subject of your affections does, you're cool with and will support with more verve and fervor than you would if you weren't totally crushing on them, OMG.

It can take many forms. The least severe are forms of mild idolization: "Did you see that catch he made? That was legendary, man!" "Dude, he was so frikkin' buff in that movie, he could have strangled a lion barehanded!" "If they could figure out a way to put an engine in a bathtub, he'd still win on Indy weekend."

More severe are the hardcore fans: "They should build a statue out of solid bronze, like in Rocky or something!" "Look, he's the greatest quarterback of all time, period." "How could he not win an Oscar for that? He was WAAAAAY better than John Malkovich!"

Then, there's the straight-up crazies. There aren't any quotes for this, as any disagreement as to the sheer-goditude of their man-crush results in the sound of fist-meets-face (mostly found in sports bars).

Well, I've found mine. It took 24 years, but I found him.

BEHOLD

I think I'm somewhere in the middle on this one. Obviously, I think he's better than John Malkovich (but I don't understand why people pay that hack money to be in movies at all). Tom Selleck, on the other hand, is frikkin' legendary, and that mustache is Epic Tier.

I first saw Tom in "Three Men and a Baby", which was directed by Mr. Spock and awesome. I never saw "Magnum PI", which I'm planning to remedy soon, but apparently America agreed with me because it was one of the most critically acclaimed shows of the 80's.

America couldn't get enough of this.

How did this come about? I'll tell you.

I love westerns. I've got several dozen of them, and I'm working my way down from the more famous ("The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", "Once Upon a Time in the West", "High Noon") to the more obscure ("Beyond the Law", "Last Stand at Sabre River", "Conagher")... and that's where I found it. A three-movie Tom Selleck Western Pack.

I've watched them all. And I knew.

Now, I'm picking up everything he's ever been in ever (except "Friends" cause I freaking hated Friends when it was on TV, there's no way I'm going to buy it) that I can easily lay my hands on.

Did you know he was going to be Indiana Jones, but he couldn't get out of doing Magnum PI? Well, he COULD have, but he decided to honor his contract.

What a guy.

He's apparently pretty nice, too, and a hard worker, and everyone who's ever met him and talked about it says he's awesome. So he's not one of those nancy-boy actors who wishes they were European, and can't eat red M&M's, and if the sun is too bright they won't go outside. He's also a member of the NRA. This just gets better and better.

Do you have any idea how many pictures there are of him without a shirt on? Neither did I, but just know: it's a bunch.

So, there you go. I admit to my Man-Crush. And if anyone says anything even remotely disparaging, I will hunt you down and make you kiss a picture of his mustache.

TONY OUT.

Movie Muhtuesday Mass Review - A-Team, Eclipse, Get Him to the Greek

2010-07-13T11:22:00.005-04:00

Oh, hey guys, how's it going?

I've determined that I'm not going to be one of those guys who blogs once every month or so. I hate those guys. (Darn guys.) So, in penance for it being so long since I last blogged atcha (it's been like a week, right? Something like that. I'm too lazy to look) here's my first MASS REVIEW!

"But Tony," you might be thinking, "those movies are already in dollar theaters, they've been out so long!" To which I say, "Yes, but SHUT UP." My time is precious, and I'm not gonna waste it on... some things.

SOME THINGS

A-Team - 7-out-of-10 T's

This flick was a good time. I have a saying when people ask me if I enjoyed something:

"If you're expecting Citizen Kane, you're going to be disappointed."

This is not Citizen Kane. This is the A-Team. This is about a group of guys who are continuously put into impossible situations, and then come out smelling like roses because they use their brains and plan stuff. Hannibal (Liam Neeson, one of my fave-rits evar) has this great line in the movie:

"Give me a minute, I'm good. Give me an hour, I'm great. Give me six months, I'm unbeatable."

I LOVE IT.

There's a bit of the film, where it's like Hannibal is passing on the planning-reigns to Face, that I didn't really dig, but he gives them back by the end. Also, there were some fight scenes that I had trouble with because they changed shots so fast, but these are minor in the grand scheme of things. This movie was fun. It explains how the A-Team got together, it's full of these characters being the characters we remember from the TV show, and there's plenty of stuff blowing up. Go to a Dollar Theater and check this out. I'd be willing to pay full price to see it again.

EXPLOSIONS!

Eclipse - 6-out-of-10 T's

I give credit where credit is due: this movie was actually decent. Was there more drama than I like? Yes. But there was valid character development, people reacted to things in ways that I understood, and there were glorious vampire-werewolf fight scenes that actually got my blood pumping a little bit.

One of my friends put it like this:

"They're getting ready to fight, and I think 'this better not suck', and then the first thing that happens is a guy punches someone's head off."

For that, I give them props.

I haven't made it that far in the books yet, but apparently when vampires die here, they break apart like marble statues. That's actually kind of cool, and a way to depict horrible violence and still get a PG-13 rating. Good thinking. I gives more props.

This is the first movie in the series that actually kept me engaged, and that I didn't want to burst out laughing at. I'd see this again. I'd rather watch, y'know, Terminator 2 or something, but I'd watch this again.

Get Him to the Greek - 8-out-of-10 T's

I laughed so hard at this. It's rowdy, it's raunchy, it shows all the debauchery that occurs in the world of a rock star, and it does it with a character I already know and like (Aldous Snow, played by Russell Brand, who first showed up in Forgetting Sarah Marshall). He's off the wagon now, and he fell off HARD.

In an effort to revive his flagging career after the release of a bad album (Called "African Child", which one reviewer referred to as "The third worst thing to happen to Africa after Famine and War"), he's doing an anniversary concert at the Greek Theater, which is in California. The dude who came up with the idea, played by Jonah Hill, has to get this off-the-wagon rock star from England to New York (to pimp to show) to California. Snow causes as much trouble along the way as possible, and it's hilarious... and sometimes scary.

Something I wasn't expecting was to actually see the downside of the lifestyle. When Hill pop's Snow's balloon-o'-heroin, Snow gets really angry. Like, junkie angry. Completely unexpected.

But, of course, this is first and foremost a comedy, and in that aspect it does not disappoint. I've already seen it twice. Another pleasant surprise was that the music was actually really good. I bought the album, which is filled with horrible single-entendre (which is like double entendre but without the effort spent on hiding), but you want to sing along with it (which I admit I totally do in the comfort of my car).

This is yet another raunchy comedy, and it's totally worth paying to see. Check it out.

And that was mah first Mass Review. Hopefully, this won't become a regular thing, but if it must, it must. Thanks for reading, and take your vitamins.

Of bulbs and explosions

2010-07-08T11:11:00.004-04:00

This is a high pressure xenon bulb. It gets crazy bright, and crazy hot. They are what is used in the projector at the movie theater that I manage. These guys don't just break, they straight up explode. If you are around during the explosion, I hope you enjoy the feeling of glass embedded in your skin.

Last night, one of them blew up.

Not this, but close.

Yesterday, the temperature was rather high, and we don't have air conditioning in the box office part of the theater. As one of my employees put it, "It's blazin'." BLAZIN' INDEED.

Beginning at 9 a.m., the temperature didn't drop below 80 degrees Fahrenheit until after 11 p.m. My theory is that the heat of the day slowly destabilized the structural integrity of the xenon bulb, and then the sweet, sweet, red-hot necrophilic obsession that was happening onscreen (we're playing "Eclipse") ended up being too much for it, and it asploded.

Poor little guy never stood a chance.

Last night was more exciting than I wanted it to be, but whatevs.

Trading a strong fist for a helping hand?

2010-07-06T11:22:00.003-04:00

I love the idea of this, but my inner skeptic is banging on the walls and calling me a moron: the Navy has converted two supertankers into hospital ships that travel to developing and third-world nations to provide free medical care, the USNS Comfort and Mercy. Both of them are "900-ft.-long modified oil tankers with triage bays, surgical wards, and 1,000 patient beds. To give you an idea of how big that is, each ship is nearly on par with Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in scale."

The rainbow is a bit much, I think.

This is all an effort to work against the bad reputation we've gotten over the last decade or so, and while these ships are Navy ships, neither of them carry any ordinance, and firing on them is considered a war crime.

Basically, what they're going for is a new strategy called "soft power": instead of going in, cowboy style with guns a-blazing and beating the crap out of anyone who looks at us funny (which is my first instinct in any situation, I'll admit, and which has served us so well in Iraq), they go to war-torn nations that aren't at war with us and assist in any way they can. We're doing our darnedest to make a good impression.

This is the Comfort in Haiti, where it is right now.

This is the very definition of what they taught us to do in Sunday School: love others, help those less fortunate, assist with no expectation of repayment (other than, you know, maybe not being 9/11'd again some time in the future, thanks), and then disappear mysteriously into the night (that was Sunday School, right? No, wait, that was from Batman...). That's why I love it.

"We're like ninjas that heal, instead of kill stuff."

Why I hate it is because of my inherent xenophobia (fear of anything alien or different, which has been bred into us since we were living in caves), which is something I hate in myself. But, I can see this coming around and biting us on the bum; it all goes back to the basics of human interaction. Do we try to make friends and create peace that way, or do we try to be strong enough so that no one is capable of hurting us? I see the appeal of both... but I'll admit, I'd probably sleep a little better with the second one. And that ticks me off.

I believe that human beings are basically evil, that we need to work against our natures to become good (the concept of "original sin"). Children need to be taught not to steal, to share, to not be selfish, because those things are what we naturally do without the outside influence of those that raise us. And I want to believe that an effort to give, to share, to assist those around us in an attempt to make friends is one that will reward us in the long run.

I have decided to take this tickedoffedness I feel and funnel it into support of this idea, to use the negative emotions that my stupid human nature insists I feel and use it to fuel support for something good. I am afraid that by helping these people, we might be fostering the notion that we are weak, which could open us up for conflict in the future, and THAT CANNOT BE. This is a truly great thing that our military is doing, and this is the right thing to do with our resources, so screw my stupid fear. Way to go, Navy.

Few things are more stereotypically American than this picture.

Oz-ZNA: the key to humanity's immortality

2010-07-01T10:15:00.004-04:00

Apparently, Ozzy Osbourne's genetics might hold the key to finding out why he's still as together as he his after decades of drugs and World of Warcraft, when so many other rock stars and everyday folks have succumbed to death's sweet embrace.

Though not entirely unscathed, is our dear Ozzy.

Really.

I mean, yeah, okay, he's still alive, but there are three people on the planet who understand anything he says, and I even doubt those three. Sharon could be making up everything when she translates for him, and we'd never know the difference, and he probably wouldn't either.

He put it on his knuckles in case he forgot, I guess.

But, credit where credit is due: I think he's still breathing, and that something that John Belushi, Steve Clark, Paul Butterfield, and about 13 bazillion other musicians/famous people cannot claim.

What I can't believe is that someone put these things together and thought this would be a good idea to spend money on. Apparently Ozzy is paying to have his DNA mapped out, which I get, because he's a frikkin' rock star and the Prince of Darkness and wipes with £100 bills (or whatever they call money in London... notes? Eh.) but there's a group of people who are going to be toiling over Ozzy's helixes day and night to see if there's a correlation between him being NOT DEAD and whether or not his DNA has anything to do with it.

I actually hope there kind of is. How awesome would that be: the front man for Black Sabbath has some kind of genetic mutation that could make humanity immune to disease, or maybe make us think bats are delicious.

Or frogs.

Someone get the man something to chew on! Please!

Or something.

The Supplement is up!

2010-06-30T10:41:00.003-04:00

Okay, check it out, folks: the Vitamin T-wilight site is up and running. If you care, there it is. If you don't, that's cool. I may mention it from time to time here, but it will largely be business as usual. Which means whatever.

One Man's Journey Through Twilight: A Supplement of Vitamin T

There you go.

I'mma read Twilight

2010-06-29T12:03:00.007-04:00

Okay, here's a thing: I'm gonna get the Twilight books, and I'm going to read the crap out of them.

Sooo... they're about AppleFlowerRibbonChess?

Some of you might be wondering, "Why, Tony?! We love you! You don't have to do this!" And you're right to wonder, but fear not: I'm doing this for you. Here's my response to your appropriately worried (and possibly imaginary) outbursts regarding my well-being:

"Chill out, guys. I got this; I'm Tony MacKenzie."

No worries.

And that's all you really need. Trust me.

Now, as to why I'm doing this, I'll tell you: because I hate the movies. So, so much. When I tell TwiHards (the chosen monicker for a Twilight enthusiast) how much I hate the movies, they tell me that "The books are better".

I CALL SHENANIGANS.

So what I propose to do is thus: I'm gonna read the books and blog about what I'm reading. I will empty my mind of all prejudices (except for the stupid sparkling, I will never forgive the stupid sparkling vampires no matter what anyone gives or promises me) and try to take a look at what I'm reading, then distill it immediately into bite-sized chunks of Vitamin T-flavored Twilighty goodness (or badness, depending on how I feel about what I've just digested).

It will probably be a separate blog, so you can read it if you want, or don't if you don't. I'm thinking "One Man's Journey Through Twilight (A Supplement of Vitamin T)". What I'm asking from you, dear readers, is how I should divide my blogged regurgitations: Crazy in depth, chapter-by-chapter breakdowns?; less in depth 5-chapter chunks?; milestone moments? Or should I scrap the whole idea for the sake of the Internet?

Your butts. Hold on to them.

Or your effeminate vampires. You can hold them too.

Lemme know.

VITAMIN RAAAAAGE (A "The Last Airbender" rant)

2010-06-25T13:50:00.006-04:00

I've already established that I want this movie to not suck, which it will probably do no matter what I offer the heathen gods of Hollywood. When it does end up chock full of horrible, I will probably rage and then fall into a quivering mass of weeping. It doesn't come out until July 2, but I've just seen the first thing that makes me want to call down my wrath upon M. Night Shyamalan. But first, a little exposition.

This is Appa. He's a six-ton flying bison. I have no idea how he flies, but he does, and he's adorable. He carries everyone around during the show, and he's kind of an unstoppable force, but he makes up for that by being, again, adorable. He's in the movie. I have no idea what he looks like on screen. But I've just seen the toy.

Wha...?

What?

WHY?!

I'm about to start quivering. Tears will soon follow.

Son, I am disappoint.

I love Shreddin' with Sasquatch

2010-06-25T10:08:00.003-04:00

Yesterday was my birthday. I'm 24 now. Also, sleepy.

Enough of that.

Saw this the other day:

I love everything about this.

1. Camping.

2. Beef Jerky

3. Classical guitar shredding

4. BIGFOOT

I believe in Bigfoot. I have no proof, I've never seen one, but it's fun to think about how there could be something on this continent (where we think we've got a good grip on things) that we simply don't know about. So, mixed emotions will be had if their existence is ever proven: I'll throw it in the faces of those who doubt with rabid abandon, but it will just be one less really cool thing to be uncertain about, like old explorers or whatever.

Also, the shredding. I love that up there. Give it a listen, and if you know of any bands that do stuff like that without being retarded like Dragonforce (I frikkin' hate their drummer, it's like he's got 17 legs and each one has a bass pedal, which is impressive considering he actually only has the 2 legs, but it gives me a headache; the guitarists are cool, though).

I also like Crazy on you by Heart... none of their other stuff, but Crazy on you is the bomb. On a side note, I've been choreographing a fight scene to that song for the better part of a year now. You know, in my head. It's awesome. Now I just need a few million dollars for werewolf and zombie makeup, a mexican luchadore, and a reformed Nazi robot from World War II. Once that happens, watch out.

What are your thoughts on the cryptozoological? Or awesome guitar music? Or beef jerky? (Man, I love beef jerky...)

Also, forgive the nonsensical blatherings of today: like I said, I'm sleepy.

TONY OUT.

Breaking food news!

2010-06-23T10:40:00.005-04:00

Whoa, whoa, guys, whoa: This just in.

McDonalds makes you fat.

I know, right? Took me completely by surprise. But out of idle curiosity, I looked up the nutrition information for the breakfast I just had, and I apparently just ate like a third of my daily allotment of calories by scarfing down that bacon, egg & cheese biscuit (delicious) and hashbrown (tastebud nirvana).

*drool*

That was like 600 calories right there. No wonder my highschool pants don't fit anymore, and I'm springing for the slacks with the elasticky waistband! I've probably eaten enough hashbrowns to force Ireland into a second famine.

I have no idea what I'm going to do to fix this, but something must be done. Not to McDonalds (they've done nothing wrong but offer delicious and fatmaking foods at low-ish prices and with astoundingly easy availability), but to me, cause I love my elasticky slacks, but I miss wearing my high school pants.

When Jack Black looks better in stretchy pants than you do,
you know you need to change something.

This probably means I'm going to have to cut down my sleep to 6 hours a night so I can fit some exercise in my day... why didn't I do it when I had plenty of time, like in college? Or even a few months ago? Graaah.

Stupid tasty food.

Internet School: 4chan

2010-06-22T13:42:00.005-04:00

In this installment of Internet School, we're going to talk about the place where everything on the internet begins: 4chan.

Just think about a few of the things you love about the internet. Funny pictures? Neat stories? Rickrolling? Odds are, 4chan had something to do with it. Like the center of a galaxy, from which all stars stem, everything beautiful (and on the flip side, everything horrible) that you can find online probably owes it's existence to 4chan, which I'm not going to link to, because if I did someone might go there and find something horrible. If you really want it, you can find it yourself, and I can go to sleep tonight with a reasonably clean conscience.

So what is 4chan?

It is a place of utter freedom. You can say whatever you want there, post and find pictures of whatever you want, laugh hysterically at their shenanigans and cry at the sad stories posted there. There are categories, known as "boards", where you go to talk about specialized things: /co/ board is comics, /x/ board is paranormal, /fit/ is health and fitness... there is pretty much a place to talk about anything there. Of course, "anything" includes some of the more unsavory, less Safe for Work (SFW) territories: pornography, pictures of real human gore, illegally copied and downloaded media.

4chan is definitely Not Safe for Work (NSFW). Or, y'know, home. Or anywhere, actually. But the darkest dark side of this magical place of wonder and terror... is the /b/ board: Random.

/b/ is truly the extreme of all that is internet. You can find anything there. ANYTHING. It's like... it's like putting a toddler with a pit bull. What will happen? It can go either way, like Schroedinger's Cat: until you see what happens, both are possible. The result could be something completely adorable, with the big dog and the kid playing and being cute and people would be all like "daaaaawwwww!"

"Daaaaawwww!"

Or. The result can be horrible. With bloodshed and tears and much weeping and gnashing of baby-stained teeth. That's /b/. And it is fueled by Anonymous. Woe is you if you attract the wrath of Anonymous.

Anonymous.

"Anonymous" is what they call the users of 4chan. They are many. They are Legion. And they can really mess you up. They have crashed websites, hacked bank accounts, fixed Time magazine's Top 100 most influential people of 2009 so the winner was 4chan's creator (a guy who goes by "moot") and so the names of the first 21 people on the list spelled out "marblecake, also The Game", which actually makes total sense if you speak Internet and which I will explain in the next Internet School. They pick the odd and pathetic on the Internet and ruin their lives for fun (or, as they say, "the lulz", which is a corruption of LoL, or Laugh out Loud).

But they love animals. They created Lolcats, which you've seen and laughed at if you've ever been online, or are, y'know, reading this article. On the flip side of all the evil they do for the sheer joy of misbehaving with no repercussions, when people post pictures or videos of people torturing animals, or when (as on more than one occasion) someone claims to be preparing to shoot up a school, they will work tirelessly to gather proof of misconduct and find out the identity of the perpetrator, then provide the information to the local authorities.

Have another something cute.

/b/, and 4chan as a whole, is a two headed monster. One breathes justice and candy and happiness, and the other breathes vengeance and spite and evil. Get involved at your own peril.

Last one, I promise.

That got a little heavy there, I'll admit. Anyway.

Like I said, next Internet School I'll tell you about Marblecake, and The Game (which you just lost).

Movie Muhthursday: Toy Story 3 - 10-out-of-10 T's

2010-06-17T10:31:00.005-04:00

Yeah. You read that right. I believe this movie to be perfect.

It hits everything you need for a family friendly film, and it does so with astronomical quality. It made me nostalgic for my childhood, which the original Toy Story was definitely a part of. It doesn't pull any punches: Toys lose their appeal after a certain age, and spend their days in boxes until there are more kids around.

It made me sad. It made me happy. It frightened me and then made me laugh. It took me to highs and lows in a way that only something that is really, truly good can do.

If you've seen the previews, you know the premise: Andy is going off to college. He hasn't played with his toys (many of whom have already been donated or yardsaled away in the years since Toy Story 2, leaving us with just the core characters: Woody, Buzz, Jessie, Bullseye, Slinky, Hamm, Rex, and the Potato Heads and their alien children).

"Daddyyyyyyy..."

Three days before Andy leaves, they are trying to get played with one more time before they get stuck in the attic for who knows how long, but a mishap ends up getting them donated to Sunnyside Daycare, a place where they'll get played with as much as they want, but has a more sinister side lurking in the shadows.

We are introduced to new characters, some that I reallyreallyreally want, like Mr. Pricklepants or the Peas in a Pod (I don't care that they're made for toddlers, they look awesome and I will fight anyone who disagrees or looks down on my for that, so there).

LOOK AT THEM, THEY'RE AWESOME. And Mr. Pricklepants is voiced by Timothy Dalton. TIMOTHY DALTON AS A PORCUPINE IN LEDERHOSEN. I love Pixar.

I... I don't want to tell you any more. I mean, I do, I want to tell you everything that happened so I can share with you just how awesome this movie is. I literally typed out a total synopsis right here, but I deleted it because that would kill it for you. If you've seen the first two, and if they had as much of an impact on you as they did on me (not many of you went to art school where "Pixar" is pretty much exactly synonymous with "You can strive to be that awesome but you can only hope to create something half as perfect" but that doesn't mean you appreciate these films any less than I do), you need to see this movie.

I'm making a declaration right now: when all of you people on the interwebs get around to watching this movie, let me know, and we'll get together and drink hot chocolate and talk about how awesome it is and how funny that part was and how it made you cry but in a good way.

It has the best possible ending. If you really really want to, just imagine what the best possible ending could be for a bunch of toys who want nothing more than to be loved and played with again, short of a Babyizer Ray shooting Andy and turning him 10 again. It's a happy-sad ending, and it's perfect.

There really isn't anything more to say. If you liked the first two, you'll like this. It's just as good, and provides closure on this series. I don't know if this is the last Toy Story they'll make, but if it is, I'm satisfied. And I'm serious about that hot chocolate.

Take the whole family. The admission price is worth every penny.

How'd you get a whole log in there?

2010-06-15T10:46:00.004-04:00

Everyone in Ohio has heard this already: the "King of Kings" statue that has been the butt of religion jokes and righteous indignation since its construction in 2004 at Solid Rock Church on I-75, burned down last night, apparently struck by the universally-recognized symbol of Holy Wrath from the Gods (a lightning bolt).

Everyone is talking about it. If the nightly news and Entertainment Tonight has taught me anything, when everyone is already talking about something, it means I need to blog about it.

Facebook is all a-flurry with people laughing at the obvious cosmic-irony of the situation, inferring that the atmospheric discharge that struck the 6-story, metal frame-filled representation of our Lord and Savior was some kind of message from On High, smiting the idol that these sinners worship before and burning it to the ground in an inferno usually reserved for the fiery pits of Hades.

Oh, jeez!

I will admit, I did the same. The thoughts occurred to me, and I commented mightily on the Intertubes. Then I sat down and took a quick look at myself.

(I'm not going to make any friends here. If you are set in that train of thought, that this was some kind of Holy Sign, and any implication of anything but will offend the crap out of you, maybe you should stop reading. If, on the other hand, you are up for a little self-inspection, please read on, and take what I say with a grain of salt.)

There's a story in the Bible, a parable, I believe that was spoken by the J-man himself: please enjoy while I lay some gospel on ya.

Matthew 7 (with paraphrasing): “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. ... Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye."

Powerful stuff, Jesus. Powerful stuff.

I was one of the righteously indignant. "How many wells could they have built in third-world countries with the $0.5 million they spent on that gaudy monstrosity" I asked. Others around me have accused the people of Solid Rock Church of idolatry, worshipping at the foot of this 60-foot-tall representation of Jesus. And then I was reminded of Matthew 7.

Let's say they did. Lets say they got down and prayed in front of this thing (which they can't, really, since there's like a pond or something in front of it): how is that any different from getting on your hands and knees in front of the alter on Sunday morning, which more-than-likely has a cross or crucifix RIGHT THERE?

Sure, they probably could have spent that money in an area that WE would deem better, more worthy, but you know what? It was their money to spend, not mine, not yours. I'm sure there are areas of your life (I know that there are plenty of them in mine) where you spent money that could have been better suited somewhere else: did you NEED to buy a BMW, or a Harley, or that dress or suit you look great in, or that steak dinner with all the trimmings, or that ice cream sundae?

No. You didn't. And I didn't either.

We could have taken all that money, all the extra cash spent by Christians every year on stuff that we simply don't need because they're status symbols (or because "we deserve it, just this once", but it isn't "just this once", is it?) and pooled it in some kind of Jesus Fund and frikkin' BOUGHT Nigeria or Uzbekistan or Haiti and made it into a paradise where everyone is happy and we worship Jesus all day long singing happy songs and wearing potato bags.

But we don't. We buy the cars, and watches, and suits, and steak dinners, and ice cream desserts and most people tithe their 10% on Sunday and feel happy and justified, but we could have done more. We could all do more.

These people at Solid Rock Church are a mystery to me. They could be a cult, with crazy devil-worshipping orgies held inside their Jesus statue, and they had one Monday, and God finally got fed up enough that he fried them all.

OR.

They could be a strong, God-fearing church that is so prosperous and so blessed by God that they felt a good thing to spend a little surplus money on was a great big statue of the Son of God. And maybe what happened last night was a bad thunderstorm that finally picked up on the metal poles inside of it and the resulting collision of positive and negative ions created a lightning strike that had absolutely nothing to do with the wrath of God.

I mean, look at all that metal.

There are worse things to spend money on. In fact, another one of the 10 Commandments (the one we mentioned earlier about Idols is in there) is "Thou shalt not steal". Well, since you're on the Internet, you've probably stolen some music, or a movie, or even just a picture that didn't belong to you but you thought was cool and decided to add to a Facebook album (you know that little box you click that says you "Have the right to distribute this picture"? Sometimes, I doubt it).

Please don't feel attacked. This isn't meant for any one individual, or if it is, it's meant for me. I'm just as bad. But it seems that for a while now, I've had this log in my eye, and I haven't been seeing clearly.

And it really, really hurt.

Need some focus, here

2010-06-14T14:44:00.004-04:00

So, I'm kind of scared right now: I have absolutely nothing to say. Usually, my nonsense-filled blatherings are fueled by the time wasting outside of work, but I don't have any time outside work any more, and I won't for a while. So I'm running on fumes here, creatively.

It's like this, but instead of a gas pump, it should be a sandwich for my brain.

The things that rule my life at the moment, that occupy all of my attention, are my job at the paper (8 a.m. to 3-ish p.m.), my job at the theater (3-ish p.m. to after midnight) and making sure that the pop-sludge that builds up in the soda fountain drain doesn't gain sentience and try to destroy Greenville. The time I do have is limited, but I want to do what I want to do, which is learn about stuff and then write about it.

That's anything. I'm crippled by my options here.

Like this, but less scenic and more "Oh, balls, I'm a hack."

So howsabout some feedback? What do you like reading me talk about?

More movies? Retro reviews? Video games? Shoot me a message or e-mail or leave a comment, and help me put a nozzle on the explosion of my awesomeness, and help me focus on something you want to read about.

(Was that legible? I'm kind of sleepy, too, so forgive me if I'm nonsensical.)

HIT IT.

Movie Muhfriday: The Karate Kid - 8-out-of-10 T's

2010-06-11T11:02:00.006-04:00

I went to bed 48 hours ago KNOWING that when I held my customary midnight show this week, the film we were going to watch was going to be terrible. Everything about this movie, from the time I saw the preview poster and realized that they were actually making the movie to the first trailer I saw, screamed to me that this would be barely watchable at best.

Apparently, the sky is green and grass is blue and I don't have the raddest mustache in Ohio, because my world has been turned all topsy turvy by this film that was supposed to suck and DIDN'T. Not even a little bit.

First off, a nitpicky problem: the name. The only karate you see in this movie is on a tiny TV screen. Karate is Japanese (Mr. Miyagi was Japanese, played by Japanese-American Pat Morita), but this movie is set in China. Here, he learns kung-fu. In Asia, this movie is called "The Kung Fu Kid", which, if they'd called it that from the beginning, I probably would have been less skeptical about it. Even now, if a week ago, they'd changed their minds and sent out new posters and changed all of the ads on TV and called it "The Kung Fu Kid", a lot of people on the interwebs and in the media and anyone who pays attention would have probably given it more of a shot from the get go. Bah. Rant over.

This is a remake in only the very loosest sense. It hits a few key points, but does it in such a way that you're all like "Yeah, I remember Mr. Miyagi doing that" or "Oh, is he gonna 'wax on' now?" But it's so different, and it even makes more sense than the way they did it in the original, that you don't care. I, at least, enjoyed this film much more than I really expected was possible.

What follows is a list of the key themes from the original film that they touch on in this movie, with a spoiler-lite example of how they do it in this film and the original.

1. Stranger in a strange land (Daniel-san moved to California with his mom against his will/Dre (Jaden Smith) moved to China with his mom against his will)

2. Gang of guys who misuse the martial arts because of their bad teacher (both films, pretty much the same, only they're a lot less blond and white in the new one)

3. Maintenance man who saves main character, does some healing magic on the beat up main character, teaches him martial arts with mundane tasks (Mr. Miyagi with the clap-rub thing, painting a fence and waxing a car teaches defense/Mr. Han with a much cooler fire-and-lightbulbs thing that you really need to see, taking a jacket on and off for days teaches defense and offense)

4. Pretty girl that offers friendship and support (Elizabeth Shue/a chinese girl whose name isn't on Wikipedia)

5. TRAINING MONTAGE!!!

6. Tournament that offers the climax of the film

My only problem with this movie happens during the tournament, and this is a problem I had with the original, too: the main character has been training in their form of martial-art for a few weeks, a few months tops, and they are successfully holding their own against dudes that have been practicing for years. That blows mah mind. I understand why that needs to happen for the purposes of the movie, but I've always had a problem suspending my disbelief there.

"My years of practice are no match for your jacket-fu!"

Also, here's a spoiler: you know the drill, click and drag to highlight them if you really wanna see.

***HERE THERE BE SPOILERS***

The final fight, the main character does some move that wins it for them. In the original it's the Crane Kick. In this one, it's kind of the crane kick, but for a different reason: Dre's leg is hurt, so he gets all balancey on one foot, focuses his chi, and when the whistle blows does A ONE-LEGGED FLYING SPIN JUMP-THING THAT KICKS THE OTHER DUDE'S FACE INTO THE GROUND, before landing back on the one leg.

Wha... what? How did... what? That was amazing, and completely impossible and silly. The announcer guy hands the trophy to the loser (who up until this point has been a thug and a hooligan and probably tortures kittens in his closet at home) to give to Dre, which he does with a smile on his face. He happily hands over the trophy. HAPPILY.

"Dude, I don't even care that I just got totally pwned in front of the entire nation of China, that flying kick thing where you smacked my face into the ground was the coolest thing I've ever seen!"

He totally says that. Y'know, with his eyes. Whut whut WHAT?!

***THE SPOILERS IS ENDED***

"I can only do this because I'm 12!"

Jackie Chan is awesome in this movie. He's dramatic. No one in America has seen a dramatic Jackie Chan. In China, he's like Elvis mixed with Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks: he's a singer, he's an action star, and he does comedy and dramas. He's like a swiss army knife of an actor... over there. Here, we just get him being an action star, or in horrible action comedies like Shanghai Noon or Rush Hour. Fun Fact: in the Chinese translation of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, he was the beast's singing voice. That's pretty cool, methinks.

"Boy, I'm famous."

He plays a dude with a history in this movie. When you find out what his history is, it takes you by surprise. And it's incredibly well done, very well portrayed on his part. You understand why he's acted the way he does for the entire movie.

By the end of it, both characters end up in better places than when they start, strengthened by each other.

"Man, kid, I should have done 'Rush Hour' with you. You're awesome."

This is a good movie, made better, I will admit, by my low expectations. That said, this was a fine film, and well worth the $5-$10 you would spend on admission. It's also family friendly, as long as you're cool with 12-year-old kids punching each other. It's PG, so it isn't terribly graphic.

"This is the part where you punch me, isn't it? Yeah. I thought so."

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Something else I hope doesn't suck: The Cape

2010-06-10T11:10:00.003-04:00

Give this a look:

Yes, it has a horrible title. Yes, The Incredible's taught us capes are silly. But you know what? I love stuff like this. This is in the tradition of the Pulp Heroes of old: the Shadow, the Green Hornet, The Phantom, The Blue Beetle, the Rocketeer, the Spirit. What do these stories have in common? Just a dude who can do something special, but isn't too lofty to get down in the muck and bust some heads in the name of "The Right Thing".

It looks to have a decent cast, and the first season of "Heroes" showed us that a TV series about something extra-ordinary can do well (as long as they don't get a big head and start to take themselves to seriously... or just expect people to watch because it used to be awesome).

It will probably be silly, and I probably won't be able to watch it because of my jobs, but I hope it's good, and I hope it does well. Just because something is silly doesn't mean it can't also be serious and fun. Serious and silly and fun. That's way better than "suck".

Lady Gaga: mad genius or unhinged hottie?

2010-06-08T12:40:00.008-04:00

Well... she LOOKS sane.

***WARNING: FOXY LADIES IN VARIOUS STATES OF UNDRESS AHEAD, AS WELL AS SOME HARSH LANGUAGES***

But, it's cool by YouTube standards, so I figure I can embed the video with little fear of repercussion. SO CHILL.

***WARNING OVAH***

So, I saw this:

Pretty sweet.

And I bought the actual song off of the iTunes. I listened to it about 20 times. And then I saw this:

... uh.

And my head exploded.

I don't know if Lady Gaga is a genius or off her nut, but she writes a good song, and she looks awesome in a chain mail bikini. What I can't figure out is what exactly is going on in that music video, or what whatever is going on has to do with the song.

The way I understand it, the song is about a girl who is stuck in the "Friend Zone". That's classic song fare: people who know popular music much better than me can probably give you three jillion examples of that idea being the plot of a song, and one that comes to mind for me is Taylor Swift's You Belong With Me.

You know why it's been used by everyone from Gaga to Swift? Probably because a lot of people get stuck there. It's something that people can relate to. I (because I'm awesomely creative) can think of three jillion more ways you can portray that in a music video.

You know what I can't imagine, though? What I, and I would assume the vast majority of humanity, can't relate to? Being wrapped in latex, stuck in a coffin, force-fed vodka, made to dance in a chain mail bikini and then lighting a guy on fire with my bra (not that I ever wear one, or would ever consider it, or... NEXT QUESTION!), or what that has to do with the song that goes with the video.

No. Frikkin'. Idea.

This might be one of those "abstract art" things that I had so much trouble with in college. But, the song has sold about a jillion jillion copies, so she must be doing something right.

GOOD JOB!

Whoops-a-doozies and personal enlightenment

2010-06-07T14:09:00.003-04:00

When I was younger and we got in the paper for doing anything, like, say, when they posted the kids in the honor roll (notice how I slipped that in there, so now you can guess how smart I am? Or was. Whatever.), it would always tick me off when they misspelled my last name: MacKenzie. You see that capital "K" there? Vital. And that 'a' betwixt the "M" and "c"? Also of world-shattering importance.

"I SAID THE 'K' IS CAPITALIZED!!!!"

I couldn't understand why they (my predecessors, meaning everyone who used to work at the Advocate and doesn't anymore, except for Linda Moody, who has been chained to her desk by people like me for the last four decades since we don't want her to leave) would get it wrong all the time. My grandparents would call in and complain, my folks would make sure I knew what they did wrong... and I haven't misspelled my last name since I was, like, 4, so I couldn't understand why THEY did.

Well, today, I got an e-mail from an annoyed mother. And I get it.

Pretty much exactly what happened.

I have less of an excuse than my predecessors did: when you list out 300 names, if you only spell one of them wrong, you're doing pretty good. The problem that arises there, though, is that that name is attached to a person who cares about how you spell it, and they don't care that you got 299/300 names right, they're all fired up and think you're a moron because you spelled 1/300 wrong.

"You painted it the wrong color, you idiot."

Now, in my defense, the kid's name was spelled differently than the norm. Her name, which was only spoken, not spelled, to me, is Kohl. I spelled it "Cole". A perfectly understandable mistake, I feel, though I do apologize for it. I could pass the buck to the teacher on duty who spelled the child's last name but not the first, or to the kindergartner herself (she could have spelled it for me, they know how to do that in kindygarden, right?), but I'm not going to. I'm not even going to blame it on laziness.

I spelled the child's name that way because I thought I'd done it right.

I do my best to get my facts correct. I did not, nor will I ever (unless it's really funny, or even slightly funny, or there's a small chance I might get even the hint of a chuckle) purposefully do something wrong. So, this mom (like my grandparents, like my parents, like every parent who's ever been unable to understand why the people at newspapers are so thick, and like, I'll admit, myself when I'm shattering worlds because of a dropped "a" or missed shift key) might think I'm doing it on purpose, like I'm out to get her kid, which is simply not the case.

Again, I apologize, but please know that it was nothing personal.

I just liked this picture, and wanted to show it again.

Movie Muhwednesday: MacGruber - 4-out-of-10 T's

2010-06-02T22:09:00.002-04:00

I’m… wow. Just wow. I didn’t like anyone in this movie. Which is a shame, because I actually love everyone in this movie. Lemme ’splain:

Will Forte. Kristin Wiig. Powers Boothe. VAL-frikkin-KILMER. Every one of these people is someone who has done something that I thought was amazing. For this film, they were brought together, and Will Forte was let loose on screen. I’ve read in the interviews that the guys who made this film have done that they just kept pushing to see what they could get away with, to see when the people with money would tell them to stop. And they never did. Usually, I’d say that was a good thing, but there’s only so many times I can hear jokes about dude-on-dude fellatio before the joke just… stops being funny.

That’s all of this movie. They hit the same note again and again, and sometimes just hit it harder and harder when what I wanted was for them to tell a different joke, and I stopped enjoying it.

Less fun than it looks.

In retrospect, I would have preferred to see a different movie, one that I’d already seen and really enjoyed.

Maybe, in order to dig this, I should have been really drunk. That might make it awesome. I can actually see that: hanging out with the guys, three sheets to the wind, and popping in MacGruber for a good time to be had by all.

That’s about it, though.

On the plus side, like I said, it had a lot of people I liked in it, and there were some parts that I laughed out loud at. Also, the story proceeds well, I don’t think they left any gaping plot holes…

I’d recommend seeing something else. Maybe Turner & Hooch (always a good choice!), or something that you know you’ll enjoy, before picking this up, or dropping $8 on a movie ticket.

That said, it’s probably better than Marmaduke.

Tonight, I update my "look"

2010-06-01T15:18:00.003-04:00

I've always been immune to fashion. As in, it never really bothered me because I'm naturally resistant to it, like that guy who never gets the common cold, or Bruce Willis is immune to bullets: the changes in the fashion world have no bearing on me and my New Balance tennies and flannel shirts.

The Look I was going for...

The Look I was actually probably pulling off.

I didn't care... until I got a job, that is.

So now, I have to look professional. I do okay: khakis, button-up shirts, black shoes (still New Balance, but all black so they don't look too out of place), but I still feel like I'm doing it wrong. Then, for Christmas, my mom and sister go out and get me some shirts and ties that match... and look really good on me. Like, seriously. Purple is not a color I ever thought I'd wear, but I pull it off pretty well.

Pretty much.

So, in an effort to take advantage of all the Memorial Day sales, I'm taking my sister (decidedly more sensitive to the tides of fashion than I) to J.C. Penney (baby steps, people; I'm not about to blow $150 on a pair of jeans at AE or wherever you kids go today) and we're gonna get me some more snazzy-wear. I'm thinking I might even buy a suit.

Hoping for this...

... but I'll settle for this.

We'll see how it goes.

Movie Muhfriday: Prince of Persia - 7-out-of-10 T's

2010-05-28T14:01:00.005-04:00

I read a review that compared this film to cinematic cotton candy: fun, pretty, but when you taste it, try to dig deeper, it disappears. I can't disagree with that, but neither do I think it's necessarily a bad thing.

On another note, I've said to people before that, when it comes to movies, I don't mind knowing how it will end as long as I enjoy the ride, kind of like a road trip. Here, I suspected the end, but I'll admit I was surprised that they actually "went there". I won't ruin it for anyone, but just imagine how a movie about a time-traveling dagger might end up, and you're probably not far off.

All that said, I liked this film. It was a fun movie to go to; the MacGuffin was interesting and it was easy to understand why everyone was searching for it, the characters developed naturally, and it was filmed excitingly and yet was easy to follow... a decent summer movie.

Jake Gyllenhaal is Dastan, a Prince of the Persian Empire. He was not born into it: the King saw him do something selfless and heroic when he was nothing but a boy in the slums; he adopted him, giving him a home and a family, and raises Dastan like a son alongside his other two boys.

Jump ahead fifteen years: the Persian army, led by all three of the Kings sons who are advised by their uncle, the king's brother Nizam (Ben Kingsley, awesome here). They discover a spy who is taking weapons to their enemies, apparently from a holy city. They are advised to take the city and stop this plot. As they siege the walls, Dastan gets all sneaky and comes in from behind, and through his awesomeness, they conquer. While this is going on, the Princess Tamina (Gemma Arterton, *reowr*), tries to hide a mysterious dagger, but it ends up in Dastan's hands.

When their father comes into the city, as it's conqueror, Dastan is expected to provide him with a gift: his older brother, the first in line for the throne, gives him a robe to present to their father. Dastan does... and the robe ends up killing him. Dastan is now a "murderer" in the eyes of his nation, and he goes on the run with the Princess, trying to clear his name.

"This was not the time for a swim, princess..."

Along the way, he discovers what the dagger can do: for short bursts, the wielder can travel back in time and change events that just happened. The first time he uses it, he doesn't realize what is happening, so a sword slice that missed him the first time catches him the second go around. Another quick burst back erases the slice, and he stops his attacker before they even know they're going to attack. It's kinda fun.

Hypothetically, what I wouldn't mind seeing (now that I know what happens) is a movie that completely cuts out the first or second run, so we see what everyone else sees: a dagger wielder who knows what's going to happen before it does. That might be interesting... in theory.

Of course, the dagger's powers are not infinite: the wielder can only go back as long as it is filled with the Sands of Time, which means it is capable of about a minute jump when it is full: activation drains the sand, and we don't know for much of the film if more can be gained anywhere.

My problem with this movie is the end, and I know what I said about a fun journey, but... watch it and you'll see why. I literally can't say anything about it. Is it as stupid a twist ending as, say, Book of Eli or The Village? No. It makes sense, it's a solid film. I just... guh. Whatever. You know what? Here: click and drag at "here there be spoilers" down and you'll highlight my spoilers. If you don't want to see the spoilers, do no clickin' or draggin' and just scroll down.

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!!!

He ends up right back where he started. Like, literally. There's a loophole or something that lets him go back to when he first got the dagger, before he's banished and kills his dad or whatever. Just about everything that happens in majority the film doesn't actually happen. So, it's like it was pointless. I love a journey, as long as I end up somewhere different because of it. It's like taking a road trip FROM home to GET home. He stops his father from dying, he gets the traitor, but everything that happened for that week DIDN'T ACTUALLY HAPPEN. I get it. I do. It's a happy ending. But I kind of left feeling all "What's the point?"

SPOILERS IS OVER!!!

I recommend this film. You won't leave disappointed, as long as you aren't expecting Citizen Kane. It's an action movie filled with pretty people and fun special effects, and it has a good story. Take your lady or fella, get some corn and a drink, and have a nice Memorial Weekend.

Raised by TV, part the 1st

2010-05-27T11:20:00.009-04:00

My parents are lovely people who did a delightful job raising me, and since I think I’m awesome, I give them major props for the glorious being that is me.

Way to go, Mom and Dad.

Now, let me shift my ego aside here *heft, thump!* and lets get on with the article.

Like most people my age, I spent a lot of my childhood watching TV. If you quantified it, I would probably hang my head in shame, but I’d be right there in Hangsville with everyone I went to High School with, so shut up, quantifiers.

The best part of daytime TV is when they show old stuff from the 80’s and 90’s. You can keep your soapy operas, give me three hours of “Matlock” five times a week, and I’m set. So, I figured for today’s dose of Vitamin T, we’d reminisce about those who ruled the airwaves in the 80’s and 90’s, and who continue to do so in syndication.

Matlock

Andy Griffith was one of the Kings of Television for decades. Every week, he’d oversee the city of Mayberry, make sure that Otis the drunk stayed funny and didn’t kill anyone with his inebriated shenanigans, keep Don Knotts from killing anyone with overeager gunplay, all while being a widower and raising a son and being followed around by a camera crew. And he was a heckuva whistler. Then, I guess he got tired of enforcing the law, and decided to start practicing it as a lawyer.

He changed his name to Ben Matlock, left Opie with Aunt Bea, and started a new life in Georgia. He had two daughters with a new wife who then died, leaving him a widower to the second power (exponentially more power than just a single widower), charged $100,000 per case, and ate only hot dogs. (Most of that is actually true.)

Here, have some math: There were 195 episodes of Matlock, with one case per episode. Lets factor in the two parters with cliffhanger endings that stretched that out to one-case-per-two episodes, maybe an occasional pro-bono case. All totaled? The man had at least $15 million by the end of the series, and that’s not including the cases he took in the off season.

"I'm rich as balls, kids!"

With his nigh-unlimited funds, cantankerous and do-it-yourself attitude, and snappy fashion sense, he’s probably the richest character to ever be on TV ever that wasn’t a cartoon duck who swam in money.

And that leads us to a spinoff that spun off of a spinoff of this show:

Diagnosis: Murder

"... yup, it was murder, alright."

Matlock gave birth to “Jake and the Fatman”, which you’ve probably never heard of since the Fatman was fat and died, probably, of being fat, but before dying, gave fat, sweaty birth to another series that kept one of the Kings of TVLand relevant into the 90’s, Diagnosis: Murder. “D:M” actually rarely showed Dick Van Dyke occasionally keeping people alive. Aside from his Patch-Adamsian “laughter is the best medicine” philosophy of health care, in which he made cancer patients think everything was going to be okay as soon as he put on a rubber nose and sang songs for them, he also taught me that it’s okay to have a mustache.

“Thank you, Mr. Van Dyke. Thank you so much.” – Tony

While that’s true, I don’t think I ever saw him do too much actual doctoring on the show. Just going around and declaring that the dead people had been, in fact, murdered. And you know what? I didn’t care a lick.

“I got you eating out of my hand, son.” And I totally would have.

With the rest of the cast up there, including his actual son playing his son on the show, for eight seasons and three TV movies, the world was blessed with Dick Van Dyke on a regular basis. And, one time in 1997, I think, they went full circle:

Absent: the Fatman. Diagnosis: death by fat.

OHMYGOSHANDHOLYJOSE, that’s Ben Matlock and Dr. Mark Sloan TOTALLY HANGING OUT! My mind, she was blown. And D:M is probably still one of my favorite shows, even though I haven’t seen an episode since Jr. High. Kind of like how candy tasted better when you were a kid, it would probably have lost something after a decade of life experiences, but it’s still fun to remember.

The A-Team

“Mr. T don’t need no shirt, fool!”
Seriously, you have no idea how hard it is
to find a pic of Mr. T with a shirt.
NO IDEA.

This series was based on fact, and no amount of cajoling or so-called proof will ever convince me otherwise. Four men, accused and convicted of a crime they did not commit, run from those that pursue them while helping those in need (for money and some sweet, sweet loving for the Faceman): The Charismatic Leader, the Handsome Face, the Mad (crazy) Pilot, and the Mad (angry) Black Man with the Black Van.

NO IDEA.

I like to think that they’re still out there, doing good, running from and outsmarting their pursuers, and breaking the crazy pilot out of the crazy ward in new, crazy ways twice a week. This show taught me that, even if you’re convicted of something you didn’t do, the situation can be remedied with explosions and mohawks and liberal amounts of stealing from the bad guys.

You’re probably wondering why the brothah doesn’t have a gun,
until you notice that he’s got two perfectly visible under
THE SHIRT HE’S NOT WEARING.

MacGyver

Never has the mullet been this glorious.

This show wasn’t on any stations I had, or if it was, it was on past my bedtime. I’ve only ever seen one episode of MacGyver, and it has effected me like you wouldn’t believe.

The gimmick is that he can make anything out of anything. In the episode I saw, he was stuck in a swamp, surrounded by the enemy, and had to keep someone alive, probably a beautiful woman or an orphan or something. You know what he did?

He filled the shafts of bamboo that were all over the swamp (I guess he was in Asia?) with swamp gas, stoppered them up with mud, lit one end on fire, and threw them at the enemy, where they exploded magnificently.

That’s the end result, over his shoulder there.

HE MADE EXPLODING JAVELINS. That qualifies anyone for hero status. And he apparently did crap like that every week. This is a show that I need to get my hands on.

In closing, thank you for reading, and taking this walk down memory lane with me. Next time on “Raised By TV” we’ll probably talk about TGIF, or the Power Rangers or something. But right now, lets just bask in the glory of Mr. T’s guns and MacGyver’s mullet.

Aaaaahhhhh…

Sea mammals defending our shores

2010-05-25T14:23:00.004-04:00

The Navy SEALS are old news kids: now, we've got Navy Dolphins and Navy Sea Lions.

No. Not these.

Apparently, the Navy has trained these animals to search for bombs and terrorists very quickly, something that would take human beings much longer to do since, you know, we swim slow. And can't really see underwater. Or hold our breath for very long. Man, we suck.

"Man, you suck." (Translated from dolphin)

One of the more surprising things about this, to me, is that we've apparently been using sea mammals for years, as far back as the Vietnam War.

What they do is this: dolphins, using echolocation, can find things like terrorists or bombs, things that shouldn't be there, very quickly. Sea lions, which can see (apparently) five times better than us while under water and are crazy dexterous (and ADORABLE) will attach a clamp or something to the legs of any people the dolphins find so we can reel them in, or attach a marker to a bomb so we can find and disarm them.

HOW AWESOME IS THAT?

"Holy crap, we're awesome!" "I know, right?!"

Hopefully, once they do a good job, they let them relax.

Possibly with an ice-cold Coca-Cola.

Perhaps even retire with a military pension?

"The people here are so friendly!" "But I wish the kids would call more..."

Movie Monday: Shrek Forever After - 6-out-of-10 T's

2010-05-24T09:55:00.007-04:00

This is the first "fourquel" (sequel, threequel, fourquel, get it? GET IT?!) I've ever written a review for, and it's for a series that has taken me through more emotional highs (Shrek 2) and lows (Shrek 3) than I thought a CG movie series about a Scottish ogre possibly could. We'll begin this review with a quick recap:

SHREK: The first movie was marvelous, feature length fractured fairy tale (like those ones on Rocky and Bulwinkle) that took what we know from our years of Disney white-washing (don't get me wrong, I loves me some Disney, but fairy tales were invented to scare kids into behaving) and spins it on its ear. A legless, tortured gingerbread man? A happy ending that doesn't turn the beast into a handsome prince, but turns the beautiful princess into a "beast" and is still pretty happy? My issues with the sound track aside, this was a solid film.

SHREK 2: They cranked the dial up to 11 here. This movie still gets me: that scene at the end when Shrek is riding to the rescue of his one true love to the glorious tunes of Jennifer Saunders singing "I need a hero"? I get the pee-shivers every time. And they added the best character to ever make a debut in a sequel (sorry, Boba Fett): Puss-in-Boots ("Shrek?" *Stops licking, looks up* "For you, baby: I could be"). And it ends happily again! With the main characters choosing to remain all Ogrey! Plus, mutant dragonky babies!

SHREK 3: This film was full of teh suck (misspelling intended, and will be explained in a forthcoming installment of "Internet School"). It had a great cast, but they got lost along the way and ended up with a whitewashed film (but without the fun of a Disney installment) and ended up utterly forgettable.

Which brings us to the present:

"Final Chapter"? I'll believe it when
I don't see a fivequel, Dreamworks.

This movie wasn't terrible. In fact, it was pretty good. I actually didn't want it to end. I won't ruin what happens, but the basic outline is thus: Shrek dreams of leaving his life of domestication, filled with the same routine day after day, taking care of babies, entertaining friends, having tourists bother him when he's on the john... he wants things to be the way they were. After doing something rather douchey and being told by his lady to get with the program and realize just what he has (three beautiful kids, a wife that loves him, friends and neighbors who adore him), he stubbornly takes a walk and meets Rumpelstiltskin. Rumpel offers him a deal: a day from his past for a day as a "real ogre again". Shrek agrees.

Stuff downspirals from there. Shrek gets what he wants, but so does Rumpel: he takes the day Shrek was born, and now he's in a world where he never existed: his swamp is a wasteland, he never rescued his true love, and Rumpel is somehow king (it's all explained, and makes sense in the film). After the day Shrek got in return is up, he'll cease to exist. OH NOES!

That's Rumpel in his "Angry Wig". Quite funny.

The best part of this movie, in my opinion, is this:

Aaaaand she wears plaid.

Fiona rescued herself in this alternate reality, and has built around herself a legion of fighting ogres who oppose the rule of Rumpel.

These guys are awesome, and Fiona is BA. Her fighting skills from the first movie return in force, only now she has axes and maces and shields and AN ARMY.

Thus far, I have merely extrapolated on what can be seen in the previews. This... this was a fun film. Was it as good as 1 or 2? No. But neither was it worse than either of them. And when it comes right down to it, I'd rather have a movie that "isn't as good as 'great'" than one that was straight-up bad. Unfortunately, not being "bad" earns you a 6 on the T-ometer, at best.

If it is the end, I'm okay with it. I doubt it, though: just like previous Shrek films, this will probably earn them dumptrucks full of money, and you never retire the golden goose (or cash cow, or... platinum pig? Whatever your choice of farm animal, I'm easy).

I recommend seeing this in a theater; it's a good addition to the Shrek-mythos. Don't bother about the 3D, though, nothing here warrants it. Save a few bucks, or spend it on popcorn, but you don't need the glasses, and besides: most of the exciting stuff in this film happens at night, and 3D glasses only make it darker.

WHY WON'T ANYONE TALK TO ME?!

2010-05-21T11:29:00.004-04:00

When this is on my desk, it's a
sure sign I'm gonna have a bad day.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again every time it makes me angry enough to post about it: the part I dislike the most about this job is when I CAN'T DO IT because people won't talk to me. I need information to do what I'm paid to do.

Usually, I can get it from phone calls, and when someone is hard to track down, that just means I need to bother the people around them until I'm being more of a hassle and more annoying than it would be to get the person I'm after to call me, or to give me their cell number. But days like today... grr.

For some reason, every time they give me a video camera, I'm rendered useless. No one will speak to me. I walk around for half an hour, asking everyone I see if they'd be willing to speak about a local issue. Last time, I was straightforward, and no one would talk to me. Then, my boss went out and got comments from EVERY SINGLE PERSON HE SPOKE TO. (Way to make me look like a slacker, people of Darke County! Thanks a ton!)

Today, I took their advice, and tried to be more sly about it: instead of "HEY talk about THIS" and shoving a camera in their face (an exaggeration of my approach last time), I was all like "Would you mind speaking about a few local issues?" I was like a ninja. Or, as much like a ninja as a 6'3" guy of expansive girth can be. (I'm as stealthy as a continent. I should try that, actually: just standing there until people forget I'm there, then surprising them. Like an earthquake, I guess.)

Nothing. They'll talk, just not on camera. GRAAAH. Or they're not from around here. Double-GRAAAH.

I'm gonna go be useless now.

Starter Pokémon: the Devolution of Cool

2010-05-18T21:59:00.004-04:00

Warning: this is a long one, kids.

Well, people of the Internet, it’s about time you learned: I’m a geek. What is a geek? It’s a nerd without the smarts. That’s me. I like movies and video games, but not just the cool ones that a guy my age is supposed to like, like God of War or Ratchet and Clank (both awesome); no, the first game I utterly conquered, the first game that I played until it was 100% complete, and which still holds a special place in my heart, was Pokémon Red.

I… I had to catch them all. ALL 150 OF THEM.

Much to my parent’s chagrin and confuzzlement, I was hooked. It was like crack, I imagine. I also imagine that from the outside looking in, it looks pretty stupid. Well, your face is stupid. Stupid face.

The point of this post, which is probably going to be more like a novel of some kind since we have five generations to go through, is to illustrate that the Pokémon that I grew up with were, by and large, better than the new ones. Kind of like the greatest generation: things were better back then, everything was fresh and new, and the possibilities were endless. Now, these stupid kids have their stupid shows and they don’t know what it was like to have to tilt your Game Boy just right in order to see the screen without glare, or how batteries needed changing every few hours because the brick went through them like a fat kid through a bag of Doritos.

GENERATION I

Look at them. They’re adorable. You’re seeing perfection there, folks: Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle. Imitated, emulated, never duplicated, these guys were the foundation upon which I wasted my 6th grade year. Introducing a generation to the idea that the Rock-Paper-Scissors trifecta could be applied to other areas. And then… then we found out they could evolve.

What?

Holy crap. Look at that. They got bigger, and even badder. Ivysaur grew some teeth there, Charmeleon got an angry look and a head spike, and Wartortle… has head wings and is farting a cloud. Kind of a step backwards there, buddy. (My little brother got a Wartortle, and when I saw this… oh, I mocked him horribly.)

Still, two out of three ain’t bad, and even though he looks a little retarded, Wartortle is still better looking than some of the other ones we’re going to see on our little romp. More on that later.

GRAAAAHH! MY MIND, SHE IS BLOWN.

I don’t even care that Venusaur’s name doesn’t make any sense (is that a palm tree with a flower on it?), he could eat your frikkin’ head. Charizard is a dragon! A DRAGON! He flies and shoots fire and looks utterly baddasssssss… but the real winner here, the one who made up for his step backwards last round by sprinting forwards (and beating the earth into submission so the rest of his trip was downhill so he could run faster) was Blastoise. Those are cannons. LOOK AT THE CANNONS. I didn’t even care that he had metal cannons coming out of his back, that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen (and I profusely apologized to the little bro once I saw that he’d traded his head-wings for BACK CANNONS; good trade, there).

Now begins the descent into suck. It’s slow at first, but you really start to feel the decline.

GENERATION II

The suck starts with Chikorita there. I have no idea what the balls that thing is even supposed to be. Some kind of… hairless hamster with a spiked collar and a leaf on it’s head? What the crap? Cyndaquil at least looked a little cool: he’s like an echidna with fire coming out of it’s back. Totodile makes the most sense here, but in the cartoon he was all ADHD and bouncy and I think he was mildly retarded. Not doing much to endear me, guys.

Sooo… it’s a dinosaur? Bayleaf still looks like a cop-out, and they’re going to have to pull a Blastoise in order to make it anything but a total disappointment when it comes to aesthetics. Quilava is less of a spiny thing now and more of a… what? A rodent? A fire-ferret? Cool name, but definitely in the awkward teenage years here. And Croconaw… sorry buddy. He seriously looks like somebody I went to school with. I think we all did: a little slow, not necessarily in the “special” class, but just kind of big and awkward. And… why is he wearing a caveman, over-the-shoulder tummy pattern? It’s just silly. 2.5 strikes for this set, fellas, saved only by Quilava’s name from getting a total strike out.

Aaaaand the disappointment. Meganium is like some kind of gay-pride alien brontosaurus here. I think they just started down the wrong path and couldn’t find their way back. Typhlosion, on the other hand, has the second- or third-coolest name of any Pokémon ever. I’m probably going to name my son that. “Typhlosion MacKenzie”. Heck yeah. Unfortunately, Feraligatr suffers from lack of spaces in the tiny game card’s memory and ends up with a name that was just one “o” away from being a decent monicker. He even looks pretty cool. It’s amazing what the lack of a vowel can do to you… sorry fellas. You tried, except for the Flowersaurusian there, and were stuck with the job of trying to out-do, or at least live up to, the perfection of Gen-1. Maybe next time…

But no. The roller coaster of suck has only just begun.

GENERATION III

These guys look… okay. I don’t mind what’s going on here. I at least recognize where they got the idea for Treecko: he’s a plant-based lizard thing. They’re even stereotypically green, so it’s a solid start; I don’t even mind that crap-eating grin he’s got on. Torchic has another great name, but… he’s a chicken. A fire chicken. What’s he going to do, other than grill himself? “Torchic used fricassee! It’s finger-lickin’ good!” No. And Mudkip… he’s got like spikey herpes on his face there. Why are you smiling, Mudkip? STD’s are no laughing matter.

What the heck, guys? Grovyle has wings now, and a pony-tail? There was the guy who could pull it off, and all those other guys who wanted to but couldn’t: guess which one you are, Grovyle? Who’s idea was this? And that grin is really starting to piss me off. Now, why doesn’t the fire-chicken have wings? Birds don’t have claws on their wing, so why should you, Combusken? Which is a terrible name, BTW. From “combust” and “chicken”. All you’re doing is making me hungry. You wouldn’t even make it to your final stage, you’d have been deep fried and covered in seven secret herbs and spices way before then. And you, Marshtomp… I don’t even know where to start with you. Your spike-herpes have seemed to calmed down a bit, but that stuff is never gonna go away. And the mohawk? One person can pull that off, Marshtomp, and you are no Mr. T.

… ugh. Just… just stop. Sceptile has a fern growing out of his butt, a couple goiters on his neck, and if he doesn’t wipe that look off his face I’m gonna do it for him. WITH A BASEBALL BAT. Blaziken, I know it isn’t your fault, but you have a horrible name: it’s like… they realized how stupid you look and tried to counter that by finding the most awesomest name evar, omg, like Dirk Awesomelazer or Phoenix McBadass, blatantly attempting and failing at the same time. And you, Swampert… I told you that the disease would spring up again. You look ridiculous, by the way, like you decided one mohawk wasn’t cool enough and figured two would be better, then decided THREE would be OFF THE CHAIN and put one on your butt. You were wrong. You were so, so wrong.

Fortunately, and right when I had given up hope, here comes an oasis, a bright spot in the dark, and reignited a glimmer of joy within my expansive and fuzzy breast.

GENERATION IV

It’s… it’s like I’m a kid again. They’re adorable. I have nothing negative to say about you, Turtwig: those leaves work so much better on you than they ever did on Treecko or Chikorita. Chimchar, you are so happy that your butt is on fire that I want to hug you and talk about how much I love that your butt is on fire. And Piplup, if you looked any sweeter, I’d probably have to start taking insulin or something cause I just developed the die-beetus. You three are like a triple play in the 7th inning of a baseball game that just had a three-hour middle where nothing happened: you pump some life into it and get the crowd excited again.

Grotle is this generation’s Wartortle: a silly teenage phase where we see potential, but don’t really know where it will lead. Monferno looks like a quarterback to me: easy confidence, not a hair out of place, and all the ladies love him. Plus, he realized that the fire on his butt, which probably made farting hilarious as a child but incredibly conspicuous as a teen, was a bad idea, so he moved it away by developing a tail. Wise move, sir. Prinplup, you lose points for both your lack of originality when it comes to your name, your dual mohawk (you might have been able to pull it off in Gen 6, but it’s too soon after Swampert, buddy), and for your pants-suit that goes up waaaay too high. He’s like Urkel a little bit… but the “Urkels” of the world also end up the “Bill Gates” of the world, so we’ll avoid judging you too harshly… for now.

HOME RUN! HOME RUN! GEN 4 GOT A HOME RUN IN THE BOTTOM OF THE 9TH!

Torterra, you’re carrying a tree and a mountain on your back. If you were real, I’d stick a La-Z-Boy up there, a mini TV and a fridge, and we’d see the world. Sure, it would probably take us a month to get to Indiana, but we would look awesome while doing it. Infernape, you’re, like, wearing armor, and you moved the fire as far away from your butt as you can, sticking with your whole “fire monkey” thing but reinventing yourself enough that people forget all about that one time you accidentally set your desk on fire your Junior year. Wise choice. And you, Empoleon… it’s like the guy who used to be in the AV department with tall pants and glasses went to college, started working out, got contacts, met a girl, then started a software company that reinvented the way people use their wrist-watches and made billions. He’s dressed up, he’s ready for business… guh. You wish you looked that good in a frilly shirt.

So good. SO GOOD. A taste of the glory days, guys. But you know what happens after a mountain?

That’s right. A valley.

GENERATION V

WHAT THE BALLS AM I EVEN LOOKING AT. This is the recently-released artwork for Gen. 5, Pokémon Black and White. They’ll probably sell a gazillion copies, cause Pokémon prints money, but you guys can do better than this. Their names haven’t been translated or properly word-played into English yet, so you’re looking at Tsutarja, Pokabu, and Mijumaru up there. I have no idea what those words mean either.

Is that another plant-lizard? Why? Did you not learn your lesson after Treecko? He’s even got that same look on his face! WHERE’S MY BAT?! And why is there another food-animal with fire powers? “Pokabu used barbecue! It’s super delicious!” But that last one… oh man. Oooooh, man. He isn’t even happy. He’s a sad, albino otter who hit the shell he was trying to open on his tummy SO HARD that it fused into his stomach-flesh. And he’s wearing a sweater vest. I’d be frowning too, but that doesn’t excuse his starter-status. He’s something you should run into a hundred times and learn to hate, like a Zubat or a Magikarp, not something that’s given to a kid who’s just starting out on his journey into the world to help him beat that world into submission.

We don’t even know what their next forms look like, they’re that new. I’ll tell you, though: my hopes are not high. I’m gonna go hang out with my Torterra now, relax in my La-Z-Boy, and slowly amble into the sunset to look for my bat.

Movie Monday: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus - 5-out-of-10 T's

2010-05-17T15:11:00.005-04:00

I have no idea what happened in this movie. Like, none whatsoever.

This review could have been about Robin Hood, but I heard that that movie sucked, so me and the guys rented something instead, and I figure this movie is recent enough to count for Movie Monday. There we are, with pizza and Pepsi and the biggest flat screen hi-def television I've ever seen (seriously, the little "Sony Pictures" clip at the beginning was the most beautiful thing my eyes have ever had the privilege to glance upon) and comfy couches, and the movie starts, and I just got more and more confused.

Here's what I gleaned, and you can find this out from the stuff on the back of the box: Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) and his midget, Mini Me, (Verne Troyer), are both immortal, I think. The Doc has a daughter who the devil (Tom Waits, awesome) will claim for his own on her 16th birthday, three days away, unless the Doc gets 5 souls by that time. Heath Ledger shows up out of nowhere and helps. And there's a mirror.

THAT IS ALL I GOT.

These films that apparently have awesome stories that bend the mind and are supposed to make you think and make sense if you think outside the box of accepted narrative stylings always give me a headache.

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S GOING ON

Dr. Parnassus was tricked by Tom Waits thousands of years ago, and now he holds the whole world in his brain or something. For some reason, he has a sideshow that he drags around England with a helper, his daughter, and Mini Me, and they try to get people to go into the mirror. When they do, they find a world ruled by their own imaginations. At some point in their psychedelic journeying through the looking glass, they are presented with a choice: good (The Dr.) or evil (The Devil). In the case of a drunk guy, it's a giant staircase (A 12x12x12 step program to recovery!) or a bar. If you choose the bad one, you explode. Or something like that.

Guh.

Why wasn't this rated worse than a 5? Very simple: even though I had no idea what I was looking at or what was going on, there were some very pretty things to look at presented in a very interesting way. Also, it had some great actors, and each of them get at least one point added because of their presence alone: Christopher Plummer +1, Colin Farrell +1, Heath Ledger +1, Johnny Depp +1, Jude Law +1, Mini Me -1, Pretty Visuals and daughter (very pretty daughter!) +1 = 5 out of 10.

Really good actors, and the ladies love 'em.

Actually, that isn't fair, Verne did a really good job. But I like my math there.

If it hadn't been for the company I kept while watching this film, and what I watched it on (GAAAAH IT WAS GLORIOUS), I probably would have hated this film. Strong visuals and good actors cannot carry a film that makes me wonder if there were special mushrooms on my pizza.

On the flip side... this thing was a labor of love. Their main character died with plenty of filming left to do, so they had to get creative. Enter the three guys up there: every time Heath goes through the mirror, he looks different on the inside. I like that idea a lot. They did what they could with what they had, and I don't know what the movie would have been if Ledger had been able to finish it, but the fact that they did finish it when they had a setback like that really kind of endears me to them.

I don't regret paying the 3 bucks to rent this. But, I'm gonna need to make some serious life changes before I watch this again: namely, become more accepting of mind-expanding pharmaceuticals.

"Doc, you should really take a hit of this..."

Something I hope won't suck...

2010-05-14T15:17:00.003-04:00

After yesterday's apocalypse scenario, lets talk about something light, but still with a potential bit of gloom 'n' doom: a cartoon.

Later this summer, a movie is coming out, and it's got me more scared than anything I've seen in a while. It isn't a scary movie. It isn't a suspenseful movie. It isn't even a mysterious movie. If we're lucky, it might have all of those things and be awesome, but I really have no idea. What it is supposed to be is a kids movie that doesn't talk down to them, a film like Chronicles of Narnia, or the good Harry Potter films. Unfortunately, what we'll probably get is another flop like Percy Jackson or Spiderwick. What am I talking about?

The Last Airbender.

I am an incredibly lucky person. I went to a college where I met people who like the same things I do, and one of those things was the now-finished, then-unfinished, Avatar: the Last Airbender on Nickelodeon.

It's set in a world with four nations, each with people who can control one of the four elements: the Fire Nation, Air Nomads, Water Tribe, and Earth Kingdom, and the people who could control these elements were called benders. Each generation, in a dalai lama-style reincarnation cycle, one person is born who can control all four of the elements, and they are called the Avatar. When an avatar dies, they are reborn into the next nation in the cycle. The current avatar was born into the air nomads... then disappeared for 100 years. During that time, the Fire Nation declared war on the other three, and now rules most of the world.

The series was groundbreaking. It found a happy medium between silly kidventures and serious plots that kept even adults engaged. They killed characters, something that I have never seen in a kids show. They didn't do it graphically, but you knew that you wouldn't be seeing that character again.

It was pretty epic.

What I love the most is that it told a story, and when it was done... it was done. The creators finished their story and left at the top of their game. They could have dragged it out for forever, watering down what they'd done, plot twists, whatever... but they didn't. They finished.

Now, the movie is coming out. If you read the fine print on that poster up there, you saw that it's been directed by M. Night Shyamalan, which has filled the fans of the series (called "Avatards") with a great deal of trepidation.

I used to love the guy. I figured he could do no wrong. I even went to so far as to say that film was invented for him to tell stories with, and was just waiting for him to show up. (You can probably still find it on my now-defunct Xanga blog from college.) Theeeeeeen came the Village. And the Happening.

Ugh. I've kinda lost faith in the guy. This is his last stand: if this film is awful... he's done, probably, and he's taken one of my favorite franchises down with him. I'm hoping that Night doesn't completely rape the series and make a movie that sucks colossally. I have low expectations of the film, but high hopes.

Do good, Night. Do good.

Engineering our own destruction: Spider-Goats

2010-05-13T12:12:00.009-04:00

I promise you that this is totally for realz: we have genetically engineered a cross between spiders and goats. The reasoning behind this abomination is sound, and if you step back and just think about how cool it is that we've actually accomplished it, it's kinda neat. But, I mean, c'mon: have these people learned nothing from SciFi Original Movies?

This is pretty much exactly what will happen. (Image found here.)

Scientists have told us for years that spider silk is stronger than steel, but we can't reproduce it in a lab, and spiders are so small that it's next to impossible to harvest enough to actually do anything with. So, in lieu of tossing up their hands in frustration and going back to modifying corn or whatever, they started thinking outside the box and shot some spider DNA into some goat fetuses.

Outside the box is EXACTLY what that is.

The product is a goat. It apparently looks, acts, smells, and produces milk like a goat. To paraphrase the Turing Test, when you can no longer tell the difference between something real and something artificial, it stops being artificial. The only real difference is in the milk: there are strands of spider silk in the milk. Not a lot, but more than if we were harvesting it from spiders, and definitely more than we've been able to produce without the goats.

This silk is, for all intents and purposes, spider silk. It's stronger than steel. They get more of it every time they milk the goats. It can be used for bridges, body armor, and, most surprisingly, in the human body to repair or replace damaged ligaments and other injuries. So far, what these scientists have done (they're Canadian, I think) is figure out a way to create a miracle material in a way that doesn't hurt anyone or anything and is easy to gather.

The spinneret gene of a spider has been artificially introduced into these goats. And it passes on through breeding, so they've got a herd of maybe 50 silk-producing goats by the last published count.

Juuuust waiting for the other shoe.

This is... it's like a movie. A bad one. Like, not even a good scary movie, like The Birds or Psycho, but a bad one, like Blood Monkey or Shark Swarm. Well meaning scientists find a way to help humanity by doing something that seems innocent. "What can go wrong?" they'll say, "It's just a herd of goats, who's it hurting?"

TRY ALL OF HUMANITY, YOU MADMEN!

"You've done a baaaad thing!"

I'll tell you exactly how this is going to go wrong: they're expecting to expand the herd to over 1,000 goats. That's a lot to keep track of. As the goats reproduce, each generation is going to start acting less and less like regular goats. It will be gradual. But slowly, like the patient hunters and cold-blooded killers they've been harvested from, the spider genes are going to start to become dominant.

They're going to overtake the goat genes, replacing the happy, friendly bits of their brains with horribly spidery bits. But they're going to keep the parts that are beneficial to them: the breathing and circulatory system, the eyesight, the hearing. They'll probably start to develop more than four legs, and show the ability to utilize their webs in ways far more dastardly than just being able to be fished out of milk.

Do you know why spiders aren't the size of cats, or dogs, or people, or cows? Because their breathing apparatus is ill-suited for anything bigger than, say, a baseball. We've given them, ON PURPOSE, better breathing apparatus. They'll start to get bigger. And deadlier. And one of that 1,000 is going to escape. Probably a pregnant female who isn't cool with laying her clutch of eggs, all 300 of them, inside the facility they're being kept in.

She'll get out. She'll lay her eggs. And then the end of humanity will begin. They'll probably cross-breed with some of the hardier wild goat species out there, like big horn sheep, and take over the mountains.

"That's spider-goat territory."

The artist in me wants to think of aesthetics. What will they look like? What's the most horrible thing I can think of, that will give future generations of spider-goat-hunted North Americans nightmares for the rest of their days?

I know two things for certain: 1. They will have eight legs and those things that aren't legs but look like them and come out of their faces with fangs on them, called pedipalps; whether or not the legs have hooves depends on where they live, mountains or cities. 2. They will have eight eyes, and they'll all be goat eyes.

EIGHT OF THEM

I don't want this to happen. But I know that it will. I know that we've probably started the clock that counts down to our destruction by making something that will surpass us on the food chain.

Or, y'know, nothing will happen. Everything will work out fine. We'll have the silk, and herds of happy, friendly, two-eyed, four-legged, goat-sized goats who want nothing more than to eat grass and tin cans and carrots and bump heads occasionally.

I doubt it though. And when the end comes... don't say I didn't warn you.

Heroes of History: Nikola Tesla

2010-05-12T12:04:00.001-04:00

Nikola Tesla, probably calculating how to teleport cats to Venus or something.

Thomas Edison is responsible for stealing and taking credit for many of the amenities we use to day: electricity, the electric light bulb, portable music (he’s credited with creating the record player), microwaves… some newspaper guy named him “The Wizard of Menlo Park”.

In reality, he was actually just a shrewd businessman, and by “shrewd business man”, I mean “lying, thieving jerkwad”.

Thomas Edison, circa 1900

Let’s talk about the lightbulb. Edison’s patent on the bulb happened in 1879, but electric light bulbs (or incandescent lamps) were being toyed around with as much as 50 years earlier than that. Here’s a list of guys you’ve never heard of: Jean Foucault, Humphrey Davy, J.W. Starr, and Heinrich Goebel. Who are they?

They’re dudes that worked on the lightbulb before Edison did. In fact, the last guy on that list, Goebel, came and tried to sell it to Edison, who turned him down. Then Goebel died. And Edison bought the patent off of his widow, probably for a deeply discounted price.

Also a bargain shopper!

So why am I talking about Thomas Edison when the article is titled “Nikola Tesla”? Because Tesla invented just about everything else that Edison is known for.

In 1884, Tesla was a young inventor. He’d moved to America from Croatia probably for the same reason everyone did: the streets were paved with cheese, or whatever. This is speculation, but he’d probably heard of Edison, maybe idolized him a little bit, and wanted to get a job with his company. So he did. Edison hired him and they promptly started arguing. Tesla said he could improve Edison’s stuff, and Edison called him on it, offering him $50,000 if he could.

Tesla did, slaving away for months on Edison’s stuff, and made some huge improvements, then went to Edison and asked for his money.

“Tesla, you don’t understand American humor.”

That’s a quote. That’s what Edison said in reply when Tesla asked for his money. “Oh, haha, it was a joke.”

Tesla invented Alternating Current (AC), which is the type of electricity we use when you plug something into a wall. It’s able to send huge amounts of electricity long distances without turning wasting it by turning into heat, unlike Edison’s Direct Current (DC), which could only be used over short distances and wasted most of its energy by turning to heat along the way. We don’t really use that anymore.

Tesla’s was better. Anyone who understood that could see it. Edison, though, couldn’t stand that, so he went around providing demonstrations as to how “dangerous” AC was by killing things with with it. Including an elephant.

Edison waged a full-on intellectual war on AC that probably set the use of electricity back decades, but on his deathbed, he said his only regret, his biggest mistake, had been in trying to develop direct current, rather than the superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp.

Tesla invented the radio, primitive radar, spark plugs, devices to for x-rays, developed ways to send electricity through the air and power inventions from across great distances, he was working on an actual “death ray”, and theorized the cell phone nearly a century before it came about, and he said this:

“The household’s daily newspaper will be printed ‘wirelessly’ in the home during the night.”

With a little modification, that sure sounds like the internet, doesn’t it?

Tesla, contemplating his awesomeness

Nikola Tesla was a genius and a marvelous showman, presenting his inventions in ways what delighted audiences, much like a magician, but fueled with bright, sparking science. Unfortunately, he was a terrible businessman, a little obsessive compulsive, and a bit of a shut in. All of this combined led to him dying alone and with a mountain of debt. And you’ve probably never heard of him.

That’s him hanging out with Mark Twain.

There’s a bit of a movement online to educate people to how awesome Tesla was, and maybe get him the recognition he deserves. Maybe you should look him up… and perhaps take another look at all that stuff your teachers told you.

Internet School: John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Douchebag Theory

2010-05-11T11:42:00.004-04:00

Respectfully stolen from Penny-Arcade.Com

That was me toning it down; the actual expletive used is in much less of a gray area when it comes to “Hey, can he say that?”

So. What is John Gabriel’s Greater Internet *Douchebag* Theory? It was first proposed by webcomic-artist/internetologist Mike Krahulik through his internet personae, John Gabriel. The theory is thus:

NP (normal person) + ? (anonymity)+ NPx (audience) = TDb (Total Douchebag)

And we’ve seen this for years, centuries even, before the internet (or the use of electricity, or soap) was even theorized: if you take a normal person and remove the constraints of having to be held accountable for what you say, we turn into total jerks. Here’s a prime example: hecklers.

Put a comedian on stage, or musician, or whatever, they can’t really see who’s in the audience because the lights are shining on them. There’s going to be one guy AT LEAST who, safe in his seat and with too much to drink, is going to give the person on stage as much trouble as he possibly can. Or anonymous letters: people writing in to, say, a newspaper, without any markings as to where the letter came from. These people say things they would NEVER say face to face. If it was something they had the guts to do, they’d do it.

Now take that situation and extrapolate it into a scenario where anonymity is guaranteed: the Internet. That extrapolation corresponds to the amount of “jerk” present almost perfectly.

Not everyone succumbs to this temptation. A lot of people do. I know that I have.

Yes. My name is Tony MacKenzie… and I’m a recovering douchebag.

The event that prompted this post, and the creation of a new category for me to blog about (“Internet School”: we’ll come back to it later), was a poster on the “Live chat” box on the Advocate Blog Site coming in and being kind of a jerk. The ratio of Jerks/Normal People is like 1/10, but I really expected better of my home town. I don’t think it should surprise me: the Theory has universal ramifications, because, as they drilled into us at an early age, none of us are really that different.

And sometimes, that’s a shame. But, it gave me something to write about, so thanks, guy.

I'mma bloggin' all over the place

2010-05-10T14:06:00.004-04:00

These interwebs just got a little more awesome...

Apparently, this blog is my personal one, which means I've been updating my personal blog at work 3 times a week for several months. Whoops.

What's happened now, though, is the big guys upstairs (actually, my bosses are like a couple yards away, and much smaller than me, but shut up) have seen fit to deem on me an "OFFICIAL TONY MACKENZIE BLOG OF THE AWESOME". I'm still keeping this one, and they'll even be called the same thing, and I'll be updating them with the same stuff (mostly), but at that one I'm accountable as an employee. I guess that makes me unaccountable here? Does that mean I can insult people without official repercussions now?

PETA IS SILLY!

That felt nice.

Anyway, it's fun. That blog will go with my new column, "A Dose of Vitamin T", that starts this Saturday and will run every other week. Rock on.

Movie Muhfriday 14: Iron Man 2 - 9-out-of-10 T's

2010-05-07T09:10:00.003-04:00

Last night, I saw Iron Man 2... and I hemorrhaged from all the awesome.

If you liked the first movie (and if you're 93% of the people who saw it, you did like it, says Rotten Tomatoes), you'll like this one. It has everything the first one had, only filled with steroids, on a sugar high, and wielding a mini-gun loaded with cocaine-laced bullets that give you a massage instead of tear through your puny human flesh.

Three years ago, I had never heard of Robert Downey, Jr., or if I did, I didn't care. Now, he's one of my faves. He takes Tony Stark, a character I've only ever really given half a care about, and makes him amazing. When you watch him, you understand why he does what he does: Tony Stark is so crazy smart that he can think through problems and conversations faster than the rest of us can have them, so he comes across as annoying and childish because he's bored by the rest of us. Then, in this movie, the glowy thing in his chest is poisoning him, so the thing that's keeping him alive is also killing him. He can't not use it, he's exhausted every resource at his disposal, and he's come up blank: there is nothing he can do. He get's self-destructive in this movie, trying to pack as much life into the time he has left as he can. Great acting here.

Gwyneth Paltrow is herself, which is what you want when you hire her. She puts in a solid performance as the one person who really, really cares about Tony Stark, and can't understand why he's apparently trying to kill himself with parties.

Mickey Rourke is great as the bad guy, Sam Rockwell is funny as the guy who wants to be Tony Stark but can't quite pull it off, Scarlett Johansson is foxy (not a lot of acting as much as kicking butt in a skin-tight jumper, which I'm okay with), Sam Jackson is Sam Jackson, which is all anyone can ever really ask for... I only have a problem with one actor in this movie, and it isn't really his fault: Don Cheadle. This is the reason this movie isn't a 10 on the T-ometer.

... Tooootally the same guy.

I liked Terrence Howard as James Rhodes in the first movie. He was serious, but I bought that he and Tony Stark were friends. That scene in the plane where they get drunk and chatter amidst pole-dancing flight attendants, the concern on his face when he rescues Tony from the desert, his teaser-riffic "Next time, baby" at the end of the movie when looking at the Mark 2 armor... I liked him. I established a connection with his version of the character.

So, in the beginning of Iron Man 2 when Don walks in to a senate hearing, all bidness, I knew in my head who he was supposed to be, but he wasn't. It isn't Don's fault. I want to stress that. It isn't even the writer's fault: if it had been Terrence, all my emotion, my liking for the character, my belief that he and Tony were friends, would have carried over. But instead, there's Don. I don't believe that he and Tony are friends: he's all bidness the entire movie. There's no "friend" there, just a military guy who hangs around and tells Tony to get his act together and whines about how much he "went to bat" for him.

Don puts in a solid performance, but I don't understand why they needed him, or why they replaced Terrence. I guess... they wanted somebody... blacker? (Can I say that?)

Anyway. Good movie, despite my little rant there. Great movie, actually. I had a blast. There were so many robot-fights... so many robot fights. Action, logical development of character, hilarity (sometimes at possibly inappropriate moments according to my father, but I don't think there's ever a bad time for humor; I freaking love "the Ex-wife"... watch the movie, you'll understand), the now-typical-but-still-welcome teasers, the actually-pretty-solidly-based-in-actual-science parts... awesome.

And stick around after the credits. I'm not even going to say what happens. Let me just say that me and the guys who stuck around after probably woke up some people with the crazy-happy shouts and dancing we did in that final split second of film. So much shouting and dancing...

Watch Iron Man 2. I'm going to see it again. I'll probably even pay to see it somewhere much nicer than where I work, because it's totally worth it.

Using human hair to save the oceans

2010-05-06T12:27:00.002-04:00

I'm totally not kidding about this. I'll be writing a story about it eventually (probably tomorrow), but hair salons all over America are collecting their discarded hair and sending it to a group called Matter of Trust: they take the hair, stuff it into pantyhose, and use that to absorb oil.

And it works.

One panty-hoe (don't really know the singular there) stuffed with human hair can apparently absorb a crap-ton of oil, and then, because we've pert-near mastered the art of getting oil out of hair (Head & Shoulders, anyone?), they can be re-used again and again.

The saviors of Earth's oceans.

As legions of emo-kids (there are 2 links there, make sure you hit both of them!) have known since the dawn of time, human hair is excellent at collecting oil. It's aDsorbent, which means it collects on the outside, as opposed to aBsorbent, which means it soaks it up on the inside.

Some hairdresser had the idea, tested it out in his pool, and told NASA. They tested it, agreed it was a feasible way to help the situation, and there you go.

Taking a break from saving the world.

Even pet groomers are getting in on the act, sending cat and dog hair.

I love this. I love everything about this. This is such a great idea, I'm surprised no one realized it decades ago. But then, the mark of a genius is someone who realizes something so obvious, everyone else should have already seen it.

What they do with their down time.

Maybe, the next time you get a hair cut, you should mention this to your stylist or barber. Your hair can help save the world.

AWESOME.

What's with all the tasings, bro?

2010-05-05T12:27:00.004-04:00

Ooooh, he's gonna get it... (AP Photo, Matt Slocum)

So this guy runs out on the field at a Phillies game, and, as you can see in that truly amazing photo (the tension there is amazing: it's like he knows what's going to happen in just a split second) he got marvelously tased to the roaring "booooos" of an entire stadium.

Americans get tased a lot. I can't walk down the street without some lady whipping out her electrodes and blasting me in the face with 50,000 volts of electricity. It's the mustache, I think; they don't know how to react.

Because I'm me, have a little taser history: it's an acronym for Tom A. Swift's Electric Rifle. Tom Swift was a fictional character who created an electric rifle in a book, and the creator of the Taser loved the character so much that he decided to actually make one. That would be like me creating a P-paws (Peter Parker's Amazing Web Shooter) or Kebab (Kal-El's Blaster of Arctic Breath). How frikkin' awesome is that?

"P-paws" is a registered trademark of Tony MacKenzie, Inc.

So, anyway, we're getting tased more often, and I actually prefer it to getting shot. I understand when people whine and moan about when it happens to a child (here or here) or old lady (story and video!), but I haven't heard of that many shootings lately. Maybe the cops are getting a little taser happy (and wouldn't you?), but as I said, I much prefer that to being shot or smacked around.

It's all about perspective, people.

POST NUMBAH 50!!! It will be commemorated with fluff.

2010-05-04T16:39:00.004-04:00

Look at all that fluff. Look at it. Oh, man, it's adorable.

Daaaaaawwww...

I iz gaitkeepr, u iz keemastah?

The destruction of Earth has never been cuter.

On a more serious note, I've worked out solidly for like a week now: I've lost a pound. At this rate, I should look like Lou Ferrigno (my personal goal) by around 2019.

Movie Muhfriday 13: the Losers - 7-out-of-10 T's

2010-04-30T13:22:00.004-04:00

There was only one thing about this movie that I really, really didn't like, and it only lasted about 3 seconds. Literally. It was a shot that went on just a few seconds too long, and left a spoken line in that I really, really hated on a visceral level. That, and this movie's MacGuffin, are why this isn't an 8 or a 9 on the T-ometer.

I loved the actors in this movie. It cast is completely made up of "Oh, THAT guy!"s, the ones that you see in other stuff, on TV maybe, and they act the crap out of each of their roles. The two famoustest people in this movie were Zoe Saldana of Star Trek and Avatar fame (so she's doing okay for herself, I suppose) and Chris Evans, who was the Human Torch and will be Captain America. I think we'll be seeing more of these kids in the future. Just a hunch.

I love ensemble movies when they're done right, and done right this is. The characters back each other up, they make fun of and support each other, and as a team are greater than the sum of their parts. Awesome.

Then there's the bad guy, Max, played by Jason Patric. He was the main character in the Lost Boys about a bajillion years ago, and played Jim Bowie in The Alamo back in ought-four. He's awesome. He's quirky, evil, and the best part is, he doesn't think he's evil. Or, if he does, he doesn't care: he has a goal, a plan for what he thinks the world should be, and he doesn't give two craps what he has to do, or who he has to kill, to make it that way. ("That wasn't a 'toss him off the building'-nod; that was a 'break a few of his fingers'-nod, at most!" Great line.)

On the downside, the scene I hate is one of his: he gives an order, an underling asks for clarification, and he repeats the order verbatim. That was fine. Up til there, I got it: "This is what I want you to do; don't ask questions, just do it." I can dig that. Then (and this is so... infinitesimally small that I'm surprised it affected me this much) he repeats it again. That third time, it just felt like too much, and my loathing for this character multiplied a thousandfold. If that bit would just go away, if they'd left it at 2, I would have been very happy with this obviously evil but still tons-of-fun villain, but now I just don't like him. That has never happened to me before.

And, of course, the MacGuffin: a crate full of *ahem* Snukes. They're Sonic Nuclear Destabilizers, and when we see one go off, it annihilates an entire island, which is swallowed by the sea. The upside to this weapon is massive, nuke-level destruction, but no nasty radiation to deal with. I understand the appeal. And Max wants to set one off in San Francisco, then blame it on some of America's enemies.

The snuke demonstration, and just the stupid name, took me out of the film. It stopped being plausible, and I was reminded every time they said that stupid, stupid name. After the demonstration, I could get back into the plot, okay, the good guys need to stop the bad guy, awesome, let's do this, and then someone mentions them, aaaand it's dumb again.

Stupid snukes.

Anyway, these are minor things. Seriously. This was a great movie, the characters were awesome, the comedy worked, the plot was good, excellent film. I'm probably gonna buy this. You should check it out.

GRAAAAAH FRUSTRATION

2010-04-29T12:13:00.004-04:00

DARN YOUR SELF IMPOSED SILENCE!!!

The second worst part about this job is when I CAN'T DO IT because people won't talk to me. That happens a lot. They don't want to go on record because they're scared that they can't go back and change what's been recorded. It's a feeling I understand, but I wish there were some people here who'd go on record, consequences be damned.

Today's foray into the realm of deafening silence was brought on by a local commissioner candidate being arrested last night for a DUI.

SCANDALOUS!!!

My assignment this morning was to roam around town and get people's opinion on this: Were you gonna vote for him? Are you still going to? Does this flagrant law breaking infuriate you? Also, would you mind giving your opinion on camera so we can post it on the interwebs?

The answer was a resounding, "Naw, thanks, brah."

Several people complimented me that I was going around asking about it, because it's important that people know and talk about it... but "I have no opinion".

MY. EYE.

So now, I look like a slacker in front of my boss. Awesome. Thanks, folks of Darke County, for worrying about your image. That does me no good.

It's gonna be a loooong weekend...

2010-04-23T13:31:00.006-04:00

I'm right there with ya, kid.

I have a couple jobs. And, as this is my blog and I can talk about whatever I darn well please, I'm going to talk about how sleepy I am right now.

Yesterday, I got up at 8 a.m., got to Job #1 (the Daily Advocate, awesomest newspaper in Darke County) at 9, and wrote hard-hitting journalistic masterpieces for a solid 8 hours (minus when I went to lunch, and checked my e-mail, and read some funny stories, but mostly hard-hitting blah-dee-blah), then got like an hour off, then went to Job #2 and did movie theater business until nearly 1 a.m. [like breaking down two movies, putting one together, changing the marquee ("Hot Tub Time Machine" was a bear to get right), doing an inventory with paperwork and numbers and making my brain not work good]. Then I got up at 7 a.m. today to go back to work for something early this morning, and then I'm up til midnight again tonight before getting up at 7 again tomorrow and then doing another "til-midnight".

Man-o-man, I's a sleepy sonuvagun. In honor of that, have some pics of sleepy things.

Daaaaawwww...

You're still pointless, but now you're pointless and sleepy.

Hey, look at how sleepy this hollow is!
... I'm sorry.

Have a nice weekend, folks.

One of my favorite handicaps

2010-04-22T10:42:00.004-04:00

How many of these have you seen today?

Among other things [that I hate (tomatoes, tap dancing) or like (having my head scratched, oatmeal-butterscotch cookies)] that I consider to be my weaknesses, I will freely admit that I've never been any good at color, and that saddens me a bit.

When I was at the Columbus College of Art and Design, I saw things that other people created that had some really fantastic colors in them and got more than a little jealous. But, try as I might, I couldn't duplicate what they could do, let alone get creative with the visible spectrum of light. It might have been sloth, as my Color Concept teacher suggested (a very unpleasant woman), or it might have been my innate impatience, but I also know that I just don't understand color. When I observe what others have done, I can appreciate it, but I couldn't apply it in a satisfactory manner to save my life. And that saddens me.

It's spring time. There are colors everywhere now. One thing that did get through my thick skull is that I see a lot more than I did before. Well, not "see", maybe "notice" is a better word. The subtle shades of yellow that happen when the sun peeks through the clouds, hints of purple in a black shirt that the lady walking down the street is wearing, how trees are only green in the most basic of senses (I can see a tree out the office's front window that's a lovely shade of pear chartreuse). While I don't know if that new found ability is worth the $70,000 I spent at CCAD, I'm glad I have it now.

Check it out. Look around, try to notice something you didn't before, or to look at it in a different way. I still may not be able to color worth a darn, but I can appreciate the colors I see. It's nice.

Retro Review: Turner & Hooch is the greatest movie ever

2010-04-21T09:41:00.006-04:00

This is frikkin' cinema gold, here.

If you've never seen it, I pity you, and invite you over to my home to watch it with me. It will be awesome.

This movie has everything that any movie needs, and it has it in spades: excellent character development, a plot that's easy to follow, buddy cops, a big funny dog, comedy, a sort of twist ending that is triumphant and sad and everything still ends up okay, and Reginald VelJohnson.

There. Now everything is okay.

In case you are one of those people who missed it and you have no intention of watching this glorious masterpiece of 80's cinema (you philistine, you), Turner (Tom Hanks) is a skinny, anal-retentive cop in a small town in California where nothing happens. He's a good cop, so good that he feels his skills are being wasted on all the nothing that goes on there. A few days before he transfers to a bigger city, a friend of his, an old hermit named Amos that lives in a boat with a huge slobbery monster that loves chocolate chip cookies and beer (Hooch, played by Beasley the Dog, R.I.P.) is murdered.

Hooch witnessed the murder, and it's now Turner's job to take care of the only eye witness: his carefully pressed and groomed and sorted life is turned upside down, and wacky hijinks ensue as Turner and Hooch begin to bond while they look for Amos' killer.

It's the bonding scenes that are my favorite. This dog could probably eat Tom Hanks, and yet he fearlessly wrestles the dog into a bath tub, chases it around the house, tackles it with a pillow and bed sheet. It's beautiful, the story of a guy and his dog.

I would say that Tom was in rare form here, but he wasn't: he was Tom Hanks in the 80's and 90's, which means he was stellar, providing better acting in his sleep than the entire cast of all three High School Musicals and anything with Channing Tatum combined and squared.

In short, I loved this movie when I was a kid, and it still stands up. In fact, now that I know WHY that lady veterinarian spent the night, the latest showing had even more character developing nuances. There should be more movies like this: Hollywood would be in much better shape.

Movie Monday 12: Kick-Ass - 9-out-of-10 T's

2010-04-19T14:37:00.006-04:00

How many times have you ever heard someone say, when referring to a movie, that "the book was better"? I know that I've been guilty of uttering that phrase myself at least a few dozen times for a few dozen movies. It is rare that a celluloid-committed adaptation is, in my opinion, a more satisfying version of the tale than its source material.

Kick-Ass is that rare occasion.

As you can see from the rating I gave this film, I enjoyed it very much. Was it perfect? No. Was it still amazing? Oh, yes indeedy. The following is a collection of words that describe this film in my mind:

Action-packed, bloody, revealing, satirical, intense, hilarious, vulgar, touching, and above all, balls-to-the-wall-amazing.

Do not take your grandmother to see this film. I made the mistake of trying to show Zombieland during a family movie night, and my mother had to leave: this leaves Z-land far behind when it comes to "Cranking that crap up to 11." Zombieland was an 11. Kick-Ass is, what, a 17?

I enjoyed the source material for this film, which was, of course, a comic book. Up until the last 3 pages of the last issue, it was a great read, but it ended on a soul-crushing note that took all the fun out of the first 6.9 issues. It did not have a happy ending. This film does. A glorious, bazooka-round exploding, mini-gun bullet riddled sequel-set-up of a happy ending that makes me more eager for a follow-up than I've been for a while.

There is blood in this film, and horrible language that comes from the mouth of an 11-year-old girl, and terrible violence that brings you down from your high of "yeah, the good guys are gonna win!" before rocketing you back up to those highs in the final sequence, and I loved nearly every second of this amazing love-letter of a movie. It gets a little slow in the middle, but picks back up wonderfully. If you liked Fight Club and Spider-Man and Zombieland and enjoy the idea of these films getting together and having a crazy love child of a movie, then you should see this.

Even more that that, you WANT to see this film, even if you don't know it yet. Just don't let your mom see it.

These are a few of my favorite things

2010-04-15T16:32:00.006-04:00

GLORIOUS...

Be they items you can touch, taste, hear, see, or smell, and sometimes not even those, these are a couple things that I really love:

When the temperature is just right (Mid 60's to low 70's), there's a long stretch of road, I've got a full tank of gas, the windows down, and a really great song comes on the radio, like "Love Gun" or "Crazy on You" (both of which have amazing guitar bits).

I come home and everyone's in a good mood, even the dog (especially the dog, she's always happy), and Mom made a roast* (*read: HEAVEN) or Dad made burgers or steak on the grill and Kevin's Famous Potatoes (you'll have to try them sometime).

After a long day at one of my two jobs, my boss says something along the lines of "You've really been cranking them (stories) out today" or "Wow, that was a good night (sales)!" It tastes like... vindication.

Baseball games and a bag full of peanuts, surrounded by friends (this is something that needs to happen more often, so who wants to go to a game?).

Days that turn out much better than expected, like, I expected that family get-together to suck and it actually turned out pretty awesome, or that party I wasn't too sure about ended up being a blast.

Impromptu throwdowns of Super Smash Brothers with people who actually care about the game and probably get waaaaaay too into it, dropping F-bombs in voices that are way too loud, then come back with a vengeance after a loss. (BONUS: Successfully getting off a Falcon Punch.)

Finding cinnamon buns on the oven after I wake up on my one day that I can sleep in (thanks, Abbey).

Random texts from friends with pictures of their cats being waaaay too adorable.

Jeans. NEXT QUESTION.

Wind that smells really good, like right before it hit my nose, it stopped by a rose bush or a fruit roll-up factory (bonus: girls that smell like fruit roll-ups. It's like a perfume or hand creme or something, and they don't know that they smell like some of my childhood snacks. BUT I KNOW.)

There are more, but that seems like enough for today...

Good gravy, it's gorgeous outside

2010-04-14T16:36:00.003-04:00

I cover everything but sports here at the Advocate, which means the sports guys are the ones who spend most of the time being paid to go outside. Me? I do most of my work on the internet or over the phone. I'm cool with that, but on days like today (73°F and Sunny), I've got to get sneaky.

This event is perfectly newsworthy, because people love pictures of toddlers messing with flowers and other outdoorsy stuff. When you put aside the notion that nature wants to kill you (something I'm actually cool with: me and nature, we has an understanding), flowers and bumblebees and gophers are pretty cool. I loves me some nature, and I love kids, so the two combined is like... Reese Cups.

Person 1: "Hey, you got toddlers in my nature!" Person 2: "You got nature in my toddlers?"

Toddler Eating Bear: "And they taste great together!"

So, anyway, I got to go outside and see the natures. It was glorious.

Pandas are pointless

2010-04-12T16:31:00.004-04:00

"Whoa, whoaaaa, man, what's with the hostility?"

SHUT UP, PANDA, you're a panda. You're pointless. You won't breed to keep your species alive, you won't utilize your carnivorous digestive system properly (choosing instead to eat bamboo, which is like eating nothing but pre-chewed gum: you don't get many nutrients out of it, and you poop most of it out), and you are unjustly adored by billions just because you're cute.

You utter, utter douche.

There are only two reasons I can think of to keep you around: my childhood stuffed animal was a panda, who I still have and love dearly, moreso than any other inanimate object I've ever encountered; and so in 50 years, I can show my grandkids Dreamworks' Kung Fu Panda and they'll understand what they're looking at. AND THATS IT.

Also, this is what you look like as a baby:

NGAAAH! KILL IT WITH FIRE!

Man, panda, you suck.

(Most of this content stolen from an article that can be found right here.)

Movie Muhfriday 11: Date Night - 4-out-of-10 T's SPOILERS!!!

2010-04-09T11:11:00.007-04:00

This is gonna be my first really spoiler heavy review, for the simple fact that I can't really relay just how ridiculous this movie was without them. So beware, for:

****HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!!!****

This movie... this movie surprised me. I really, really wanted this to be awesome, because I loved everything about the premise: two of the greatest screen comedians (Steve Carell and Tina Fey) playing roles that I totally believe they could be in real life (a married couple who are kind of stuck in a groove) who do something daring and get thrust into a situation that is anything but boring. That, my friends, has the potential to be cinematic and comedy gold.

The film did not live up to its potential. Here's a handy graph I whipped up, which I will refer back to in the remainder of this review. It gets kinda long, so forgive me. I'll try to throw in enough witty "zings" to keep this entertaining. Also, lots of links, because I like links, and if Wikipedia were a person, I'd elect them President of Everything Awesome.

The movie begins on a pretty good note: Steve and Tina are married, they're pretty successful, and they're comfortable with each other... but the spark is gone. Everything is predictable, and then one of their married-couple-friends announce that they're getting divorced. They don't hate each other, but neither are they in love... they're just "Really excellent room mates."

You can see that this strikes a chord with our heroes.

So, on their next scheduled Date Night, Tina gets all gussied up (which is awesome cause I have a bit of a crush of Tina Fey, for which I am not at all ashamed), which prompts Steve to make some extra effort as well, and they go into the city to try dinner some place fancy and new. Of course, they can't get in, so they do that little bit of daring and take someone's reservation. The reservation makers were no shows, so who's it gonna hurt, right? And they have a great time.

Then, come the bad guys: they believe that Steve and Tina are the ones who made the reservation, the Triplehorns, and the Triplehorns have something that the bad guys want. Great setup, right? That's what I thought. I was digging the movie up till right about now. Then, there's the shooting.

You remember the action scenes in "Walker, Texas Ranger"? There was a way the camera moved, which is pretty common for all action scenes on TV, but that's where I noticed it first. It was different from movies. Well, when S & T make their escape, I felt like I was watching a TV movie. Just... the way the camera moved, the way the heroes were avoiding bullets, how they moved just a little too fast, like they took out one frame for every 4 or 5, so they look like their in more of a hurry but it doesn't quite jive with our senses. That's what it felt like. Not bad, I guess (I love me some Walker) but it kinda took me out of the movie.

And here begins our Ridiculosity Curve.

The bad guys think S&T have something, a flash drive that has something they want. S&T can't go to the police for reasons I shan't divulge, so they go to somebody that Tina knew years ago, who works private security/mercenary jobs/government shenanigans: Mark Wahlberg.

I like Marky Mark. He grew on me after the Italian Job, then I saw Shooter, Invincible, i ♥ huckabees ... the dude won me over. In this, he is the Deus Ex Machina, he's the God in the Machine, he's the person they go to to make the more ridiculous bits of the plot make some semblance of sense, and it doesn't really work.

Then, they steal his car. What follows should probably be insulting to black people (that doesn't really require a link, but there's a Wikipedia article, so I had to let everyone know about it) everywhere. There's a cab driver, who is black, and is in the film for the entirety of the car chase, so about 4 minutes, which is just long enough to spout every token-black-guy phrase ever committed to film, including "that is whack" and other stuff I've blocked out from embarrassment. Then he jumps out of the car. Awesome.

Well, they find out that the person who's looking for them isn't the person they thought, its some other guy, who frequents a strip club that comes with hookers. Before they go in, though, they return to Marky Mark, who apparently helps them with more ridiculousness.

They go to the hooker-club, Tina pretending to be a hooker, Steve pretending to be her pimp, and they get into the room of the guy that's been looking for them. He doesn't know who they are, though, and for some reason before they tell him, they play along with his erotic fantasizing and do the most awkward two-person pole dance I've ever seen ever (not that I've seen many, so that isn't really hard, but it's still just... bad to watch).

Once they spill the beans, they are taken to the roof, where they instigate a fight between the people who they thought were looking for them and the people who were actually looking for them, and then the cops show up. Yay! Also, Steve had a wire on (provided by Marky Mark), so when the bad guys were talking as they fought, he caught their confession on tape! Everyone goes home happy.

Here's where it gets back to the movie I wanted: I knew this was going to happen before I saw the movie, and I was fine with that. Sometimes, it's okay that you know how a movie is going to end, as long as the journey has some new stuff in it. This ending I was cool with... I just wish the body of the film had been different.

Steve and Tina have breakfast, talk about why they love each other, they go home, and in the safety of their yard, proceed to make with the passionate kissing on the lawn.

****THE SPOILERS IS ENDED!!!****

There were funny bits. I just think that they lost track of what they were doing during the middle of this movie, and it suffered for it. I really believe that this could have been a great movie, which makes the disappointment of what it actually is that much more of a let down.

You'll be okay renting this, and I'd even recommend seeing it at a dollar theater maybe, but this movie isn't worth an $8 ticket.

Regret sucks, and humble pie tastes like crap

2010-04-08T15:41:00.006-04:00

It's waaaaay too early to be looking back at my 23 years of life and regret things that I've done, or haven't done, but look back I do, and regret I do.

I saw a MySpace quiz that someone I know filled out back in 2005 (you know, when MySpace was still relevant) and one of the questions was "What do you regret?" The person had replied with a brief and to-the-point "nothing", to which I threw up my hands and cried out "BULL!"

Everyone regrets something. I, for example, regret that I wasn't a better looking kid (cause lemme tell you, I was horrifying for a few years there; it comes as no surprise to me now that I was less than the Lothario I am now during those elementary-to-middle school days), something that could have been remedied if I'd spent more time outside hitting things with sticks and less time behind wind-blocking garbage cans at recess reading books (true story).

I also regret the pent-up aggression and self-loathing that comes with having a better-looking, more-popular, and more-successful younger brother and sister, but I salve that raw spot with the belief that they saw what I did wrong and learned from it (Abbey is great at hitting things with sticks). Whether or not that's actually the case, I hope I can take that belief and the comfort it provides to my grave.

Then there's the fact that I talked a big talk throughout High School and College. I told everyone, everyone, that I was gonna be a big-shot comic artist, and then a designer, and then a toy designer... and when it came right down to it, I couldn't back it up. All my talk for eight years, including the now groan-inducing talk I had with my parents about how "I can't fail, I refuse to fail" and then a year later I was living at home, that all came crashing down around my ears.

I have a good job. Two, actually. I can't complain, and moreso, I refuse to. Ohio's unemployment is nearly 11 percent. That means that if you got ten strangers together, one whole person and another person from the ankles down would be unemployed. And I've got two jobs that I actually enjoy pretty well. Not bad, if I say so myself.

Still, people still come up to me and ask me what happened to the Hasbro job, or when my comic is coming out, or if I'm still drawing, and the answer is "I couldn't hack it", "It's not" and "no, now go away you crazy person". That's followed by an awkward silence. Nothing is worse than talking big and then failing to back it up.

The last few months have been invaluable. Aside from the silences, I've worked my butt off for 9 months, working two, and for a while there 3, jobs, paying loans back, making a niche for myself here. People know me now, and they ask about the news, or what movies are coming out. Sometimes, I actually have something valuable to contribute. Honestly, I'd rather have a crappy job (which I don't) in the greatest nation on Earth than be a Ph. D. in Choppayuheadoffistan, because the crappy jobs here really aren't that crappy.

It's just been a learning experience. I've still got, like, 3/4's of my life left, barring horrible and debilitating accidents or diseases. I never have a problem with learning stuff.

I still wouldn't mind running Disney, though, but that's filed firmly under "Future Plans" and cross-filed under "Keep that close to your chest", so don't tell anyone; we'll just keep that our little secret.

What does a bunny have to do with Easter?

2010-04-05T12:53:00.006-04:00

(Pic unrelated, but still pretty awesome.)

It’s pretty common knowledge amongst the scholar-community that many current religious holidays are amalgams of church-sanctioned holidays and pagan holidays or natural events.

One such explanation for Christmas (which is when the birth of Christ is celebrated, an event whose date no one has been able to actually agree on in the last 2,000 years) is that, in the 4th century, the church worked out their official calendar, placing Christmas on the day of the Winter Solstice, Dec. 25. Over the last 16 centuries, due to the Earth’s rotation and changing position, the solstice is currently between Dec. 21 and 22, but the Christmas celebration stayed put.

But today is Easter, which is marked as the day of Christ’s resurrection and defeat of death, a time of rebirth and renewal. Plants return to life after months of dormancy, the weather starts to get nicer, birds start to sing and animals start to make babies. It all makes sense… until you include the egg-laying rabbit that sneaks into houses and leaves goodies: the Easter Bunny.

When Christianity began to spread to Northern Europe, it seemed like a good idea to take those pagan holidays practiced by the people missionaries were trying to convert and put a Christian context on them. One of those holidays was the Eostre Festival, which celebrated life and fertility, and was held in honor of Eostre, goddess of dawn, spring, and fertility. Her symbols were the hare, which is known for it’s quick rate of reproduction, and the egg, from which life springs.

So, those Christian missionaries saw these festivals and celebrations, and figured they’d use them to explain the Resurrection of Christ to the pagan masses. By their figuring, the Resurrection even happened around the same time, so this easy comparison seemed to be a gift from God. Naturally, a little give was necessary on the part of the missionaries, so the hare and egg got blended with the celebration of the Resurrection, and they even kept the name, which has changed over the centuries to it’s current spelling: Easter.

The Easter Bunny came to America with Pennsylvania Dutch settlers in the 1700s, known by them as the Oschter Haws (that’s German for “hare”), and got thrown into the Americanization Machine, and started bringing candies and pastries alongside colored eggs, picking up a bright pink bow tie and waistcoat along the way.

Here’s a fun fact: European settlers even took Easter to Australia, along with rabbits, where are not native to the land down under. In the last few centuries, those rabbits have multiplied vigorously, and are now considered a serious pest problem. They’ve caused millions of dollars in crop and property damage, and led to the decline of several native species. Thus, since its a bad idea to use a species everyone hates as a symbol for a religious holiday, they’ve replaced the Easter Bunny with the Easter Bilby, which is a small mammal that looks like a rabbit crossed with a kangaroo, and with a longer snout.

And that’s why the celebration surrounding the Resurrection of Christ has an egg-laying mammal in a bow tie as a mascot.

20-foot bubbles of poo

2010-04-02T11:03:00.004-04:00

First, let me state, this is not a joke. I promise. Or, if it is, it isn't my joke, and I have fallen for it as hard as you will. I doubt that, though. Anyway.

So, this dairy farmer in Winchester has about 1,650 cows, and what do cows do? They poop. It's nature. Everybody poops. (Heh. Poop. It's funny because I'm actually 12, and I've been fooling you all for years.) What do you do with the manure from 16.5 hundred dairy cows? Why you put it in a pit, lined with the things they used at landfills, and let it liquefy, then sell it to people to use on their crops. This liner is a fairly new idea, I guess, because this guy was among the first Indiana farmers to use it. Getting his permit to farm hinged on it, actually.

Well, in the fall of 2006, some bubbles started to peek out of the surface of these open air poo-pools, and the farmer said, and this is a quote: "This doesn't look right." I frikkin' love this guy.

The black liner that is keeping the poop from seeping into the groundwater and contaminating in a way that only 21 million gallons of liquid feces can (21 MILLION GALLONS. Of poop!) has detached and filled with methane gas, popping up above the surface of the pools, sometimes growing to 20 feet (wide or tall, I'm not sure), and can be seen in satellite photos. Really. Click that, then click "Aerial Map".

His proposed plan to deal with the problem, though, is my favorite part: it includes a gas mask, a small boat, and a Swiss Army Knife.

... Awesome.

Indiana officials are considering his proposal. In the meantime, I'm imagining what will happen if he does: scenarios range from explosions (which happened to a pig farmer who had a similar problem, launching him 40 feet, and he sustained burns and singed hair) to a tidal wave of poop when that pressure is released and the pool is allowed to settle. I just hope he doesn't get hurt... though if he gets doused by a poo-wave, it would be absolutely hilarious.

Congress outlaws April Fools's Day

2010-04-01T10:00:00.005-04:00

Tony MacKenzie

Staff Writer

tmackenzie@dailyadvocate.com

DARKE — After over 600 years of unjustly punishing the gullible, The United States Congress has finally enacted legislation to protect those who are taken advantage of on April 1, more commonly known by the insulting monicker “April Fools’ Day”.

Section 04.01.2010 of the controversial Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act that President Barack Obama signed into law on March 30 stated that Congress found the usually harmless shenanigans, hoaxes, pranks and practical jokes enacted by friends, family, enemies, or complete strangers annually on April 1 to be “unconstitutional and prejudicial against otherwise rightfully trusting citizens of these United States.” (Rep. Jonathan Buck, D - MA.) Therefore, April 1 will now be removed from every calendar in production within the United States, jumping straight to April 2. What used to be April 1 will now be referred to as “Noday”, and is now a National Holiday.

“I can’t believe they slipped that one by us,” said Rep. John Boehner, House Minority Leader in the 111th Congress.

The earliest known reference to April 1 being used to play tricks on others is in Geoffrey Chaucer’s "Canterbury Tales", which was published in 1392. In the story "The Nun’s Priest’s Tale", a vain rooster named Chauntecler is tricked by a fox on “March 32”, which is April 1.

Other examples of Historical Aprilfirstian Tomfoolery include an incident in 1539, when a Flemish poet named Eduard de Dene wrote about a nobleman who sent his servant back and forth on absurd errands on April 1st, supposedly to help prepare for a wedding feast. Another, which first occurred in 1698, consisted of several British citizens being tricked into visiting the menagerie at the Tower of London to “see the lions washed”. That has since become a tradition event, tricking the uninformed, and occasionally, people will even give away tickets to the “Annual Ceremony”.

Other famous tricks include a 1998 article in the monthly newsletter New Mexicans for Science and Reason, claiming that the Alabama Legislature had voted to change the mathematical constant “pi”, which starts out with 3.14 and continues on into infinity, to the “Biblical value of 3”; or, in 1957, the British Broadcasting Corporation ran a hoax in 1957 showing Italians harvesting spaghetti from trees. They received a large number of phone calls after the program ran, with people asking about how they could cultivate their own pasta-producing plants.

While this new law is only in effect within the boundaries of the United States of America, tourists from this great nation are not protected from these heinous acts perpetrated while on foreign soil, so Congress suggests vacationing within the country, lest U.S. citizens be accosted by tasteless pranks.

Also, in a minor footnote to the bill, the word "gullible" has been removed from all copies of Webster's Dictionary sold in the United States of America, marking the first time in history that the U.S. Government has outlawed a word.

Slow day, so have a bunny

2010-03-31T15:04:00.000-04:00

There. That's for you. Have a nice day.

Your daily dose of Vitamin T

I'm done here...

Movie Muhfriday - The Social Network - 9-out-of-10 T's

Movie Grading Scale REVISITED

I like it with a hint of something impossible

Tony goes to the Ren Fest!

Movie MuhFriday: Legend of the Guardians - 7-out-of-10 T's

America fights pirates!

I'm worried about how much this appeals to me

And now for something healthy and nutritious

Movie Muhwednesday: The Expendables - 7-out-of-10 T's

Misadventures with my new phone

The Other Guys - 8-out-of-10 T's

Soooo close they can taste it

Mah schedule

I'm old fashioned that way

Trust me

Movie Muhfriday: Inception - 9-out-of-10 T's

The Hetero Man-Crush

Movie Muhtuesday Mass Review - A-Team, Eclipse, Get Him to the Greek

Of bulbs and explosions

Trading a strong fist for a helping hand?

Oz-ZNA: the key to humanity's immortality

The Supplement is up!

I'mma read Twilight

VITAMIN RAAAAAGE (A "The Last Airbender" rant)

I love Shreddin' with Sasquatch

Breaking food news!

Internet School: 4chan

Movie Muhthursday: Toy Story 3 - 10-out-of-10 T's

How'd you get a whole log in there?

Need some focus, here

Movie Muhfriday: The Karate Kid - 8-out-of-10 T's

Something else I hope doesn't suck: The Cape

Lady Gaga: mad genius or unhinged hottie?

Whoops-a-doozies and personal enlightenment

Movie Muhwednesday: MacGruber - 4-out-of-10 T's

Tonight, I update my "look"

Movie Muhfriday: Prince of Persia - 7-out-of-10 T's

Raised by TV, part the 1st

Sea mammals defending our shores

Movie Monday: Shrek Forever After - 6-out-of-10 T's

WHY WON'T ANYONE TALK TO ME?!

Starter Pokémon: the Devolution of Cool

Movie Monday: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus - 5-out-of-10 T's

Something I hope won't suck...

Engineering our own destruction: Spider-Goats

Heroes of History: Nikola Tesla

Internet School: John Gabriel’s Greater Internet *Douchebag* Theory

I'mma bloggin' all over the place

Movie Muhfriday 14: Iron Man 2 - 9-out-of-10 T's

Using human hair to save the oceans

What's with all the tasings, bro?

POST NUMBAH 50!!! It will be commemorated with fluff.

Movie Muhfriday 13: the Losers - 7-out-of-10 T's

GRAAAAAH FRUSTRATION

It's gonna be a loooong weekend...

One of my favorite handicaps

Retro Review: Turner & Hooch is the greatest movie ever

Movie Monday 12: Kick-Ass - 9-out-of-10 T's

These are a few of my favorite things

Good gravy, it's gorgeous outside

Pandas are pointless

Movie Muhfriday 11: Date Night - 4-out-of-10 T's *SPOILERS!!!*

Regret sucks, and humble pie tastes like crap

What does a bunny have to do with Easter?

20-foot bubbles of poo

Congress outlaws April Fools's Day

Slow day, so have a bunny

Internet School: John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Douchebag Theory

Movie Muhfriday 11: Date Night - 4-out-of-10 T's SPOILERS!!!