No more crack before bed

I dreamed that I was having a conversation with a couple of random people walking down the street about how the new Colorado Rockies (MLB) owner is pretty out there... That he's the only one where none of his players are in the union because he doesn't believe in it, so when the looming baseball strike comes they may still be playing.

Also, about how he's been a very vocal voice for legalization of marijuana and wants to allow it throughout his stadium at home games.

I said that like it or not, MLB said they wanted a different and challenging kinda new owner for that team, and here it is.

Mind you, I don't think any of the above is the least bit true, and I have absolutely no idea who the owner or owners of the Colorado Rockies are. Or why I'd be thinking of them in the first place.

Hey, would you remind repeating the last 5 minutes of your conversation for me?

Don't be this guy.

You're at an event and you walk up to a small group chatting, and clearly catch the END of a story.

"He'll never go back to THAT store again, lemme tell ya!!!"


Do NOT say "Hey! Who won't go back to that store? Wait, what store? Why won't he go back? Tell me!"


Let the moment go. Hell, you've actually lucked out, the story's probably over, you can even if you really want to try to join in moving forward.

Everyone who needs to understand the details of the anecdote clearly got it. "Hello. Can you summarize the key points of everything you just said to all these people for me?" is at best awkward and in practice kinda rude.

Add in that even casual storytelling has thematic elements --- a sense of timing, buildup, humor, etc... asking to have it Cliff Noted for you will never read you into the experience.

You missed the train. Get the next train.

"I like sugar syrup isn't as catchy"

If you're drinking a vanilla half-caffeine mocha caramel frappuccino with extra foam and whipped cream, don't say you "need your coffee lolz!!!!"

You clearly don't like anything resembling coffee.

Think they'll have that on the mug in the gift shop?

You really should choose for your child a name that's something original, and yet something with which you have a positive association.

That's why we're eagerly anticipating the coming arrival of MostofTheScenesInReturnOfTheJediThatDon'tHaveEwoks Washington Gerber.

A Clockwork Red?

Posted by Anna Kournikova to Facebook today

Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.


I'm not sure how to say Clockwork Orange in Russian. But then the book is barely in English to begin with.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

Looking at buzzfeed lists of stuff 90s kids look back fondly on -- some of which actually came AFTER my youth (or perhaps my parents just didn't feel a compelling urge to have purple ketchup in the house)... I wonder if we're rapidly approaching some sort of weird folded over on itself again state of "metanostalgia".

In five years will we be saying "hey, remember how there used to be all those remember this list articles?"

What happens when we cast our thoughts back fondly on some collection of nostalgia that was retro style in the first place? "Hey, I found this old 'Which Happy Days character are you' Quiz!"

I think that's probably the day SkyNet becomes self-aware.

Hunger games part 3 part 1 review

Okay, a couple of big caveats...

1) I haven't read any of the Hunger Games books. I'm not even familiar with them. So I won't have any "this was left out" or "they should have included this part from the book..."

That's not necessarily a disadvantage. Films shouldn't depend upon a lot of outside knowledge by their audience. If you can't portray something that was in the book that's a fault of the movie, not the moviegoer. Ya know, provided it's not a Bible movie or Sherlock Holmes or something.

2) this'll never be a movie blog. To really dissect a film you probably oughta watch it multiple times. So outside of the occasional Star Wars rant or my House of Cards binge, you won't see much "Men on Film" here...

That's already more preamble than this movie got... and that's a shame. It's full of characters making reference to past events Katniss "missed", and it's never shown to us, occurring or in flashbacks. 

That wouldn't be so bad, except what we get instead is about 1/3 a film of Katniss sorrowfully surveying the leftover rubble and about 1/4 a film of her buckling under the pressure of everything that happened (offscreen).

There's always a bit of watering down the punch when a trilogy is stretched into a... ummm... quadrilogy (is that a thing?). Suffice it to say this is a 90 minute movie that feels like it had 40 pages of script that just said "Katniss looks sorrowful."

There's a weird bit where the Rebel Alliance blows up The Emperor's hydroelectric dam (I'm just gonna go ahead and use Star Wars terms here because reasons). And so the ENTIRE Capital city is 100% dark. Not one generator, hell, no one lit a candle or started a fire. The Rebels in their Hoth base seem to all have lanterns and such and even use them freely when the base's oxygen is cut to 14% (which itself seems dodgy), so apparently they're not in short supply.

There were occasionally episodes of 24 or Hpuse of Cards where at the end of think "Well, shit... Nothing really happened. But then I guess someone can't die EVERY week. Sometimes you gotta have one that is really just moving chess pieces into position." 

So I guess ultimately that's what this was. A movie Millard Fillmore. Not good, not bad, just sorta caretaker to get you along.

It's just frustrating. You don't start Jedi by having your characters chat about Luke getting his hand chopped off and Han getting frozen, then show 30 mins of Leia mope. Throw the audience a bone.

How about a Jar Jar Binks prisoner exchange?

So, Sony is quashing The Interview in response to terrorist threats from interests in North Korea.

If they really wanted to get some international heft, the North Korean government shoulda blocked Matrix Reloaded. I think we could have given a Nobel Peace Prize for intervening there.

So my letters that they honor Demolition Man remain unanswered

So apparently Time's Person of the Year is "The Ebola Caregivers" or some such collective.

Meh.

I never care for it when they get cute and do something other than have the Person of the Year be, ya know, a Person. They've done this with increasing frequency recently... the person of the year will be "Earth" or "You" or some such vaguery.

It seems to be an attempt to be clever, but I think once they broke the seal by not having it be an individual they've since gone to the well too many times (how's that for a tortured mix of metaphors?)

Though to be fair, a bit of Wikipediaing (is that a verb yet?) sees apparently their first time being cute was 1950 with "The American fighting-man". What would a 1950 equivalent of "Meh." have been?

Also on the final list, apparently, was "Ferguson Protestors". I'm just glad at least they didn't pick that. Not for any haughty political or racial reasons... just that awards like this seem to suffer sometimes from a bias of recency. Whatever is freshest in our minds is the "biggest" thing that happened in the year. Apparently last year they very nearly gave it to Miley Cyrus, who "coincidentally" had just had the fococta twerking thing on MTV. At least cooler heads prevailed there, with his Popeliness just beating out the first woman who ever shook her ass while dancing.

They should make the whole plane out of the turkey

Blah blah after the turkey something something a-NAP-polis!!!

Wokka wokka

Red state, blue state...

We survived the silly season of a lot of talk of red states and blue states...

And then there's this.

"Scoreboard"!

Don't Go Vote

Your social media channels are presumably clogged up like 836 in an afternoon rainstorm... though instead of 2004 Honda Civics that don't signal right or left you're lost among political comments that do nothing but signal right or left. Today, it's dominated by one message: "Go vote!"

My sentiment is a bit different. I say Go vote**!

** Unless you are the kind of low-watt bulb that votes based on something like "Which candidate you'd rather have a beer with", which one looks better, for/against "The Hispanic-sounding name", or some other such inanity. 

I'm not just saying "Go vote, unless you're an idiot" (well okay that's actually most of my point). There's a bit more nuance here though.

If you haven't voted until Election Day but always planned to go out today, and you read up a bit --- or ask a friend you know who's really into politics, or even just print out the endorsements from a likeminded organization, then please go vote.

If you have a friend on Facebook who says "Go vote", and your response is "Oh that's right, that's today isn't it?" then do us all a favor and stay the hell home. Vote for America's Next Top Voice Can Dance With The Stars and leave the republic to people who won't go in and Christmas Tree the Scantron.

Updating

"Uhhh yes I'd like to exchange this LeBron Heat jersey for a Dolphins jersey.

Which one? Oh... Is Jason Taylor still on the team? Wait no I heard he might go to the Jets or something."

First Church of Bacon: Confession

Bless me fryer friar, for I have sinned. It's been like 12 hours since I last had sausages.

So, there's this whole cottage nerdherd industry that's popped up around pointing out that eating bacon is a damned fine idea.

There are shirts proclaiming the love of bacon. BaconFreak.com is a store site entirely dedicated to all the products you can get, including a not-small page called "Bacon Beverages" (which apparently is distinct from the "Swine & Wine" section). Jim Gaffigan has a whole shtick in his standup routine about bacon in all its awesome glory.

Here's my penance. I love bacon. I also am a (sadly increasingly) big fan of ham. And sausage. And pepperoni. And pork chops. See, it turns out that pork can often be prepared into a variety of tasty dishes.

So, why are we treating bacon like it's something we just discovered and named for the first time ever?

Gimme a million dollars and I'll call her whatever you want

So have you picked a name?

Nunya.

Nunya? That's unusual. What is that, Russian?

Short for "Nunya Damn Business."

Ebola? More like SHEbola! Am I right? Huh?

Gonna launch a new app, specifically for people who want to get the latest stats, profiles and news on today's professional bowlers.

I'm calling it E-bowla.

I'm hoping it goes viral.

The ability to eat your meat AND have your pudding.

I've been hearing a lot of discussion about how Jameis Winston is killing his NFL career options because of college chicanery.

I dunno, it's worth pointing out that the two longest careers for Noles from the previous championship were Lavernaeus Coles (who got kicked off the team) and Sebastian Janikowski (who was supposedly nearly kicked out of the country).

I'm sure a lot of teams are really thrilled they passed on Dan Marino because he mighta partaken in the ol' devil weed in college. Randy Moss and Warren Sapp probably are just fine with how their careers turned out, thanks.

Man code confession....

I regularly forget which one is the Big Ten and which one is the Big 12.

I'm sure this is partially my brain rebelling against the fact that there are now fourteen teams in the Big Ten and ten teams in the Big 12.

At least I know which teams are generally grouped together... I just seem to have a block against which stupid moniker they're clinging to.

Also... Army uniform now comes with sneakers.

This blog has received EXCLUSIVE VIDEO of how, exactly, the Obama administration expects to honor its promise that it can confront ISIL in Iraq and Syria without introducing any boots on the ground.

Review of I, Alex Cross by James Patterson

I, Alex Cross by James Patterson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

You can give this one a pass, and you won't be missing much.

There isn't much in this book that could be considered thought-provoking or even especially challenging.

When a man who's readily recognizable and highly connected in the White House is committing sex crimes, and then the author makes a point of saying it's not the VP and the president is a married woman, well... it weren't the butler.

I saw another reviewer here bring up an excellent point as well. Alex Cross doesn't actually UNCOVER much of anything in this book. The Brit (Nicholson?) hands him a video of the crime, and Generic Agent X hands him another video of the crime. A witness tells him who did it, and they go off to arrest the guy. Cross doesn't actually DO a great deal in this, at least in terms of investigative work. It all drops in his lap.

Once you get past a small handful of characters (Cross, his central casting grandmother, and to a lesser degree Bree), there's almost no description or fleshing out of characters. The various elected officials & staffers are all interchangeable and pretty one-dimensional, as are any other cops. I guess it's unfair to criticize a thin central character in the middle of what's a serial of books but it's also telling that at the end when Cross proposes to Bree... to that point I had no idea she wasn't his wife.

It's largely inoffensive, and I pushed through the CDs relatively quickly. I'd say it's relegated to beach reading, but it doesn't even have the benefit of a lot of dramatic tension or suspense that would make it light yet entertaining fare.

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Have you thought about not sucking?

I listen to a lot of sports radio. I guess it's a "guilty pleasure" of sorts. It's really pretty ticky-tacky content sometimes. But you do get good updates and some of the hosts are pretty entertaining and/or humorous.

Since I'm generally listening to the Miami stations, I hear a lot of Canes callers. It occurs to me these fans pretty much fall into one of two camps (no, NOT alumni and the other 95% of the fan base)...

Caller I: "It's really disconcerting when I see the UM offense relegated chiefly to screen passes and dump-offs to the safety valve receiver for short gains. Starting a true freshman is a gamble. Even when trailing against a team like Louisville, the vertical threat seems to be almost completely eliminated, which of course means the box gets loaded up to shut down the run as well. Is this concern being sufficiently addressed?"

Caller II: "We're BAD. We used to be GOOD. We lose now. We should not lose. Other teams should lose to us. We had SWAGGER! I want swagger. This coach should go away and instead there should be a coach that is GOOD."

Interestingly, I suspect it's more of the FIRST category that actually goes to the games when UM plays FAMU this weekend... and more of the second that has a UM logo tattoo (and, okay yes... went to FIU.)

The Theory of Everything That Is Convenient To Plot Device?

So there's (another?) movie coming out about Stephen Hawking's life. I can see how it could make a pretty compelling drama. I can also see how it could make a virtually bulletproof anti-abortion argument, but that's SUCH another topic for another time (which may be the twelfth never).

It seems the story chiefly focuses on his illness and precipitous decline, but presented as a love story. That might get a bit tricky since he apparently left his first wife for one of his nurses (and subsequently divorced #2 too.)

Hopefully they don't pull too much out of their ass like they did with A Beautiful Mind... I think that'd be hard because Stephen Hawking's certainly better known and documented than John Nash will ever be. Nash ain't gonna get calls from Star Trek, Simpsons and Big Bang Theory to swing by.

I'm hoping for more of a Walk The Line-esque "warts and all" kind of approach. It's funny that in the trailer they drop in the bit about the voice of his speech system being "American" even though he's a Brit. I've read before that he's said (perhaps as humor) that's the one thing that bothers him about his condition.

I wonder, only half-seriously... if the system were designed today instead of 40 years ago, would it be built for things like linking YouTube videos instead of picking words from menus?

 I think I could probably go an entire day just responding to people by clicking on YouTube links. (Depending on my stubbornness and licensing restrictions I might be able to do it with just lines from The Godfather). I don't particularly intend to try that anytime soon, though.

As Irish as French fries

Gonna start a band specifically built around lip synching songs for Riverdance albums. It's gonna be called Sham Rock.

Review of Farside by Ben Bova. Ugh.

So apparently I can now post my Goodreads reviews to my own blog. So I will, because...reasons. Farside by Ben Bova
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ugh.

I just hope reading this doesn't sour someone out there from trying similar entries in the genre that are a bit more daring like The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein.

If there's a vehicle in this book, prepare for it to "trundle" across the surface. Thesaurus be damned. You may have trouble remembering that Dr. Ulrich, the facility's research chief, is interested in the Nobel Prize --- because it's only mentioned about 18x and sometimes there's a full three lines between this fact being brought up again. The main "character", Trudy, has a face that's round. Grant wants to know if the nanobots in his body could have been responsible --- then he is going to go ask IN PERSON if the nanobots in his body could have been responsible. Then he's going to ask okay REALLY this time...

After sections on nanomachines being able to bore into things microscopically, there's a great deal of dithering about as these scientists try to surmise what might be responsible for microscopic pinholes appearing in things. One of the big reveals is: But what element are they eating? It's the vanadium!! (I don't know what, exactly, as a reader we're supposed to do with that information. It doesn't exactly unlock any other doors).

The story hints at what could have at LEAST been a good - if paint by numbers - horror/mystery by having a confined space where a pinprick could kill dozens of people and nobody knows who's toting around the pins. Sort of an Alien minus the alien. Instead, when people are quarantined on the far side of the moon and a couple of people suddenly die, everyone seems... I'd call it "inconvenienced"?

Similarly wasted opportunity: We think that planet out there might be similar to Earth. We build (at great expense and loss of life) a telescope. It detected there are indeed signs of being like Earth! Aaaaaand that's all you'll hear about that. I mean introducing an Earth2 is kind of "Chekov's Gun". You really should DO something with it once it's established. The reaction on Earth1 if they looked through the 'scope and saw, say, signs of ancient cities over yonder... well now maybe THAT could have been an interesting story.


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No me gusta.

Someone totally Typhoid Mary'd us at one of the July 4 parties. TLMS and I are pretty laid out. She's barely left the bedroom since Friday. Ugh.

Another new Drawnlines.com article

From my entirely too infrequent blog...

The firm of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Crist, a-phoneys at law. (via www.drawnlines.com)

“I couldn’t be consistent with myself and my core beliefs, and stay with a party that was so unfriendly toward the African-American president, I’ll just go there. I was a Republican, and I saw the activists and what they were doing; it was intolerable…

---

A PSA you'll never see

Two guys in a high school parking lot.

Guy #1: "Dude... you don't want to get a Chevy Volt, that car's kinda gay."

Girl off to the side: "Guys! It's really lame to use the word gay to refer to something you don't think is cool! It hurts."

Guy #2: "Really? Because it seems to me like the people fighting the redefining of the word 'gay' are the same ones that changed its meaning in our parents' generation. Actually, come to think of it you just used 'lame' and 'cool', both of which are slang that have evolved through common usage. That's how English works."

Girl off to the side: "Gay kids are subject to ridicule and abuse and violence all over. It has to stop!"

Guy #1: "See now it's weird that you'd use that adjective. Kids of any kind shouldn't be abused and hurt... why do we need a classification more than that?"

Girl off to the side: "RACIST!"

Shed a tear for hipsters....

...for they won't be able to drink this beer before it was cool.

http://www.thatsnerdalicious.com/beer/ever-wonder-what-a-3300-year-old-beer-would-taste-like/?tru=Fc4eG#more-67351

That's Nerdalicious: "Curious About What a 3,300 Year-Old Beer Tastes Like?"

Curious About What A 3,300-Year-Old Beer Tastes Like?
Read more at http://www.thatsnerdalicious.com/beer/ever-wonder-what-a-3300-year-old-beer-would-taste-like/#3VTQM3QvTKFvo8XW.99

Curious About What A 3,300-Year-Old Beer Tastes Like?
Read more at http://www.thatsnerdalicious.com/beer/ever-wonder-what-a-3300-year-old-beer-would-taste-like/#3VTQM3QvTKFvo8XW.99

An Act of Parliament

I dreamt I was talking to Bootsy Collins in 1969 when he was coming up (which I'm not sure he was), told him I saw him in concert in the late 1990s (which I'm not sure i did), and to take comfort in the fact that he's still relevant even today in 2014 (which I'm not sure he is).

Cuz you gotta have dreams. And class.

I think really my secret deepest goal is someday to be rich enough and connected enough that I can make donations to legislators just to get them to put random shit out there on official record.

Like, giving a state senator a thousand bucks to find a way to legitimately use "#SimpsonsDidIt !!!" from the floor.

Or tossing a congressman $10,000 to say "Mr. chair, I'd like to take a moment of personal privilege if I might. Ahem. MONKEYS!!!!!!!! Thank you."