What to do?

This was quite some time ago. We were driving out in the country when we got a flat tire. There were no phone booths around and there certainly were no cell phones at the time. And that’s when we had an interesting discussion about what one should do.

The sun was setting and it was getting dark, so we thought, should we just sit and wait, hoping for a Good Samaritan that may never come by? Or should we head up to that big, run-down, mysterious-looking house way off to the side of the road? The big lonely one with only one light on and no neighbors for miles around?

At first we decided to just sit. My argument was that I’d seen way too many horror films, and by gosh this was always how they started. On the other hand, my friend countered that it was also one of the most common ways that a porno film started. (I didn't ask how he knew)

So how do you know what to do? How do you know what genre you’re in? Is that how it is in the current crop of horror films? That all the teens in them just assume that they’re really in a porno film when they stupidly walk into these situations?

Wouldn’t life be easier if we just knew which genre we were in?

(unlike most horror or porno films, we had a spare tire, so we changed it ourselves and were back on the road within 15 minutes)

I'm BACK!

Not to state the obvious, but Las Vegas was a BLAST!

We had a BALL driving up and down the strip! We saw shows, threw some money away at the slots! The FOOD! The LIGHTS! It was GREAT!

We got there at 1AM Friday, and on the drive to the hotel (The Excalibur!) we first saw all the lights. Everything is so lit up and flashing! This was our first trip, so we were quite amazed.

We saw Rick Thomas Magic show, V: the Variety Show, we went to Star Trek: The Experience (even my daughter, who is no fan, had fun there) We went to the top of the Effiel Tower at night and saw the beautiful view, we saw the Dancing Fountain a few times and we 'witnessed' the erupting volcano. We ate the big hot dog at Westward Ho (my god was it a big dog)

It was great. I'd go back in a moment, and I don't even gamble. (okay, I did a little; won about $50!)

Got back home at 8AM Wednesday. So sad it was over too quick.

More later....

GONE FISHIN'

I will be in Las Vegas the next few days, and won't have access to a PC. Wish me luck, and have good week!

Apologies

I apologize for being away. Last Friday night a friend of the family passed away, on Saturday my wife spoke to another friend who's brother had died in a car crash a few days earlier, and then on Sunday I got a call that one of my peers from work, who became ill on Thursday, passed away earlier that day. It's been kind of subdued around here the last few days, at home AND at work.

They have a Grief Counselor in the office for us, but I'm not sure I want to go, and if I did, I'm not sure of what to say. I've never had to go to one before, never even thought about it before. Luckily the 'opportunity' has never arisen before. (but over time, as I get older, I'm sure it will)

I don't feel this need to say anything I haven't already said to friends in the office. I feel sad, and I'm going to miss her, but what does one say to a Grief Counselor, who, to be frank, is a complete stranger?

And tomorrow night we leave for Las Vegas for a big Birthday Party/Family Reunion of sorts. We have planned and have looked forward to this trip for months, but I do feel a little guilty that I will miss the memorial service planned for my friend on Friday afternoon.

But I will be thinking of her.

Uh, oh.....

Okay, now this is just TOO damn weird. I'm really starting to look over my shoulder now, glancing into all the dark corners...

I was cleaning the house today and it was the master bathroom's turn (as opposed to the....slave bathroom?) I was picking the magazines and sections of newspaper used to pass the time while sitting on the toilet that had accumulated in the past week. One of the sections on the top of the pile was the comics. I figured my son was reading them while doing his business.

This particular section was the comic sectiom from the Sun-Sentinal, dated Saturday January 8, 2005. Strange that they were from the paper from one week ago exactly, and that they were not there the day before. Strange, but only a little.

As I looked them over, seeing if I had already read them, I noticed something that stunned me rigid.

I had in fact read them. Two in particular. 'Red and Rover' and 'Beetle Baily.' The last words in the last panel of 'Red and Rover' were "...a journey of 238,857 miles begins with a single step."

What freaked me out was that nearly right next to it, in the first panel of 'Beetle Baily, ' were the words "...a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

I had read this comic last week. In fact, I pointed it out to my wife while we were having breakfast that morning. She was on the phone talking and just gave me a little smile. I live to amuse her. At the time I thought it was just a neat little coincidence, nothing more, and I forgot all about it.

But didn't I just write about something similar happening to me the other day, only verbally? Let me check; oh, yes, I see that I wrote that THIS HAS BEEN HAPPENING TO ME A LOT LATELY.

I had thought of the comics as I was writing about the other similar events, but I couldn't remember what exactly it was that was repeated, and I figured the paper was long gone anyway, so I didn't mention it. But here it was, now sitting in my bathroom today when it wasn't yesterday.

Should I be a little concerned? That I'm hearing the same word being used only moments apart, in different unrelated places by different unrelated people? Should I be more than a little worried that I'm catching reality having these little hiccups, little loops of time where words are being repeated? That maybe pieces of time itself are being...reused? That perhaps I have seen something about the workings of the universe that maybe I shouldn't have? Do I now have in my hands written proof that... something is going on?

Where is Rod Serling when you need him? (cue the twilight zone music)

Time After Time

It's Friday already. Seems like this week went by very quickly. Was I not paying attention? Was I having too much fun? (no... I doubt that) Did somehow time itself speed up when I wasn't looking? Or is this just a condition of age? That the older you get, the faster the days seem to go by?

If this is how it is now, I can't imagine how it'll be when I hit 80; the days must fly by at the speed of light. No wonder a lot of people that age seem to be in a fog; the days must seem to be spinning past them too damn fast.

That must be why they start thinking about where to go for dinner....at noon!

What was that? What?

Something strange has been happening lately.

The other day at work I walked by some people having a normal conversation, and I heard some of what they were saying. As I passed them I heard one of them use a word, a word I know, a word that I've heard before, but it wasn't a common word, not something that I'd hear every day. I can't remember now what it was, but I think the word might have been 'uncontrollability' or something similar.

It wouldn't even have registered in my head if I had not, only a few minutes later as I walked over to the other side of the floor, caught someone else using that very same uncommon word. In a totally unrelated conversation, with totally different people.

It was a bit weird but I didn't thing too much about it. Just a coincidence, right?

But then it happened again. It has now happened to me several times this week, with separate words (that strangely I cannot remember....any of them) I'd hear someone say a single, not-so-common word, then mere moments later, I'd hear it again, somebody else using that very same word in another context entirely.

The second time I felt just a little bit freaked. After the third time it happened it was downright creepy. I found myself listening everywhere for more examples of it, trying to see if there was a pattern, or if the same word showed up more than once.

I started thinking that it's like a Matrix sort of thing, where 'reality' has a tiny glitch in it, like there is some small loop that is being rerun somehow. And I'm the only one catching it.

Has this happened before to any of you? Is there a name for this phenomenon? Some form of déjà vu? If I were a more paranoid person, I might think that something is going on.

Let the ridicule commence.

ONE More Movie (for now)

One more movie I heard about; Shane Carruth's PRIMER
From http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/artandindustry/primer.htm

"....bored 30-year-old engineers trying to invent some get-rich gizmo in a garage. In the process, they stumble onto a device that's too valuable to market and that will allow them to have pretty much anything they want. Since the device is a crude form of a time machine...."

Sounds cool to me.

Correction

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA movie is technically a musical, not an opera. (Thank you Mr. Overzealous Man who I've seen on several other websites who seems to have made it his mission in life to correct every living soul on the planet about this point)

BTW, I wanted to mention in my last post that I think LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING is not only a fantastic, wonderfully stirring movie on its own but it completes a trilogy of films that go far and away above and beyond, in every facet, any other trilogy ever filmed, which includes The GODFATHER, STAR WARS, and INDIANA JONES trilogies.

NOTES:

QUEER EYE FOR THE STRAIGHT GUY is STILL a very funny show.

FOREVER KNIGHT is a VERY cool show. I watched it when it was on late night TV years ago, and now that it's on DVD, I remember how good it was (is)

UPDATE: We are now on hour 8PM-9PM of Season Three of '24'. So far, very cool.

Movie Stuff

So instead of a list of movies I liked from LAST year (like SHAUN OF THE DEAD, THE INCREDIBLES, LEMONY SNICKET, SPIDER-MAN 2, DAY AFTER TOMORROW, RINGU, THE GRUDGE, GARDEN STATE...) here is some stuff on some movies I'm looking forward to seeing THIS year.....

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
I read the books years ago and loved the dry, strangely logical silliness of Douglas Adams. I love the silly, card-boardy TV show, and now that it's out on DVD I don't have to be afraid that my VHS copy will cry out 'Enough already!' and snap in two. I recently bought the original BBC radio show audio CDs and I loved those too. Each one was slightly different in its own way. The sad thing is Adams passed away before production on the movie started. He did write the script, so there is hope. If they can infuse his spirit and love and passion into this movie, it might be magic. Please make this movie as much fun as ANY of the other permutations and I will be happy!

WAR OF THE WORLDS
This is one of those movies you might ask, why remake it? George Pal's original WAR OF THE WORLDS is one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. But with Spielberg behind the remake, it just might kick some ass. And Tom Cruise has proved to me that he respects genre films. Look at 'Minority Report' and 'Interview with a Vampire.' I'm ready for the invasion!

Tim Burton's CORPSE BRIDE
Here's what I read about this one: 'Set in a 19th century European village, this stop-motion, animated feature follows the story of Victor, a young man who is whisked away to the underworld and wed to a mysterious Corpse Bride, while his real bride, Victoria, waits bereft in the land of the living. Although life in the Land of the Dead proves to be a lot more colorful than his strict Victorian upbringing, Victor learns that there is nothing in this world, or the next, that can keep him away from his one true love.'
Stop-motion, animated feature! Tim Burton! Johnny Depp! Christopher Lee! Albert Finney! Helena Bonham Carter! Need I say more?!

LAND OF THE DEAD
Finally! George A Romero returns to the genre he invented with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (creepyest movie ever made!) and still reigns supreme. I saw DAY OF THE DEAD on opening day, October 31 (Halloween!) 1985, dressed as a zombie! I arrived early and I sat with my eyes closed, all alone in the theater. When others started to arrive, as they got near me and started whispering, I slowly opened my eyes and sat up. Freaked them all out! I was also the last to leave; I threw the theater doors open with a bang, and slowly shuffled out, past a silent crowd! To think that there will be a new George Romero zombie movie this year make me shiver with delight!

Also coming up is STAR WARS: REVENGE OF THE SITH, BATMAN BEGINS, and FANTASTIC FOUR, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much with these three films. Episodes I and II were okay, but they didn't come near to giving me that excited feeling I got when I first saw the original STAR WARS (before it was re-named 'Episode IV') I'm hoping like hell that, if this really is THE LAST STAR WARS MOVIE, that George hits this one way out of the park.
As for BATMAN BEGINS, after BATMAN FOREVER and BATMAN AND ROBIN, although I don't detest these two films as much as it seemed most people do, I certainly don't want to see another film in that vein. Let's hope Warner Bros learned something from that experience and comes out with a killer Batman movie.
And didn't someone already make a FANTASTIC FOUR movie that was so bad it never was even released?

Also coming up is RING 2, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, SUPERMAN........

More later....

COLLEGE?!?

Last night my daughter attended her very first college level class!

Whoa! I am NOT ready for this.

Over the last few months we have been looking at schools and gathering information, and we’ve been talking a lot about it. But it didn’t seem ‘real’ yet.

After all the talking, she made a final selection of the university she wanted to go to. It’s a big, hard-to-get-into state university. Some of her friends applied to go here, and some applied to go elsewhere. I was proud that she didn’t just pick the same place her best friend did.

We went to visit the university, her first school of choice, and while we were there she even went out to a frat house and a few other places with one of her friends who already is attending the university.

So we have been slowly easing ourselves into the idea that my daughter is not only old enough to be doing this, but actually WILL BE ATTENDING college next summer. But even then, it still didn’t seem quite ‘real’ yet.

She sent in her application (helping her fill it out was just plain weird) and waited.

By the time the decisions were due to come out she was a nervous wreck. On the day they were to be released, some of her friends asked if she’d received her letter yet. As she hadn’t, she called me and asked me to call the admissions office and see when the letters went out.

I found out that letters had only gone out that day and the day before. But I was told that we could also look it up on their website after 5:00pm that day. The mail came and no letter arrived, so we waited for 5:00pm to come.

At 5:15pm (we had to wait for my wife to return from work) we all sat anxiously around the computer, and my daughter started to log in. Got an error message saying she was already logged in. She tried again, and got the same error message. I told her to ‘log out’ first, then log back in.

It worked. On the third try, she got in. As the page loaded, we only got as far as seeing the word “Congratulations!” appear before she jumped up and started screaming. We all did.

And to be honest, even though in the back of my head I thought, ‘she GOT ACCEPTED! so why am I so excited? this means she’ll be away as of June’ it still just didn’t hit me.

After all this, and even though she signed up to do dual-enrollment (high school with college courses) on Tuesday, it was her actually going to this class last night that has somehow really made it OFFICIAL.

My daughter has now attended her first college class!

I am STILL not ready for this.

F*uck Every*thing

The other day I was talking to my wife about my daughters’ garbage mouth. My daughter seems to like using the F-word a lot. It’s f *cking this, f *cking that, f *cking EVERYTHING! I don't think she talks so much like this when she's around her friends; no, I think she saves the best for us. And it hasn’t mattered how many times we've told her to stop talking like that, that is sounds trashy and stupid, she still uses that word as often as she uses the word 'like.' (Okay, she sometimes changes to friggin’ this and friggin’ that, but mostly it's f*cking this and f *cking that)

So I told my wife we should do the same. At dinner that night I was going to say something like ‘hey, please pass me the f *cking salt’ or something equally idiotic. I thought it might show her how stupid it sounds.

So we sat down to eat. We were all talking, and we were even getting close to finishing the meal. My son excused himself from the table and went into the back room to play his video game. I don’t even remember how it started but I said something like 'so what's for f*cking dessert?' My wife answered me back in the same way.

Fairly quickly my daughter realized what was going on and joined in. Yes, it was just as silly as it sounds, and soon we were starting to giggle, all while saying 'f *cking' after every other word.

“Who wants more f *cking macaroni?”
“I don’t f *cking want any more.”
“Can I have some more f *cking water?”
“Go f *cking get it yourself. And while you’re f *cking at it get me some too”

As we were talking this trashy way, we were starting to laugh harder and louder. My wife warned us that the front window is open and the neighbors might hear.

“Who gives a f *ck? I don’t f *cking care!”
“What’s on f *cking TV tonight?”
“I don’t f *cking know.”
We were now trying to find inventively new ways to use the f-word.
“I have this f *cking bruise on my f *cking leg that won’t f *cking go away.”

Suddenly, from the back room, my 13 year old son joined in by calling out, “Will you all please shut the f *ck up?!”

As stupid as all this sounds, at this we all were reduced to tears we were laughing so hard.

And of course it didn’t work.

Because last night my son asked if we can play the F-word game again.

A BIG Question

So what was I? A jock, a freak or a nerd?

This was the question that I, along with probably every other child ever born, pondered long and hard while in High School, although maybe not in exactly those words.

I know growing up is a confusing time for everyone. New and strange thoughts are appearing in your brain out of nowhere, filling up your head, exciting and scary feelings are flowing through your body, making you do the dumbest things, and weird and bizarre things are happening to the very skin you live in. It’s something we all go through.

Jocks were the guys into all the sports. If you were a stoner or musician, you were a freak. If you like to read, were one of the guys in the photography club or some Science club, or you ran the AV equipment in class, you were a nerd. I know now that it isn’t a matter of you having to personally choose to be one or the other and that they were all mutually exclusive, but back High School, it certainly seemed like it was, and you were lumped into one or the other whether you liked it or not.

So what was I?

I played on the school baseball team and in Little League. I went out for basketball, and I ran on the track team, but I also loved music and was in the school band (I played violin and clarinet in elementary school, later in Jr High I was a drummer in a rock band) I listened to both rock and classical music.

I also love photography, and even got into ham radio a little bit. I also loved a good snowball fight, and got into my fair share of late night mischief with the guys.

Some of my friends were the ‘four-letter’ sports guys. I also had friends who had the long hair and skipped classes to go to the park for an afternoon to do who-knows-what. I had friends in the Physics club and I loved going to the Museum of Natural History.

There were times during the school year that I was one of those guys who had to wear a nice shirt and tie to school on game days. Other times it was jeans and a tee-shirt. I wasn’t smart enough to be in the math club but I had a blast with the model wooden bridge building contest the Physics club held every semester.

And I wasn’t one of those whiny, moping ‘nobody understands me’ types. I also wasn’t one of those silently weird people whose eyes dart all around and seemed to think everyone is after them. I had no hidden agenda. I had no problem figuring out whether I liked girls or boys. (I was, and I admit still am, somewhat confused about how to deal with females, but I’ve known all along that I LOVED them!) All in all, I seemed pretty “Normal.”

So what was I....a jock or a freak or a nerd? Even today I’m still not sure what I was back then. But I think I know what I am today.

More later...

End of Year List

Being that it was The End of the Year, it seemed like the thing to do was to write a post about my favorite movies of this past 12 months. I mean, it seems like every other media outlet has done their own End of the Year listmaking, why shouldn't I?

But then as I started, I looked at all the movies that I did like, and because I watch so much on DVD, most of them weren't so new. So how could I write something about my favorite movies of 2004 if most of the movies weren’t released in 2004? It wouldn't really be a 'Best of 2004' kind of list.

So then I thought I could write a list of my favorite movies THAT I WATCHED IN 2004, which still made me feel like I was not following the proper 'End of Year' procedure.

So I was sitting there, looking at a blinking cursor, wondering which way to go. And I got stuck there.

FLIP: So why am I doing this? When I think about it, there are already way too many of these things, and I didn’t want to start sounding like one of those obnoxious people who each December seem to feel it's their duty to thrust upon us their bloated, self-important End of Year lists. I sometimes get the feeling that they think we're all stupid, as if we were all born without the mental capacity to form our own opinions, so we have to let the FOX network and The Enquirer do it for us.

FLOP: But I will admit I do like reading some of them. Some of these lists give me ideas of movies or TV shows that I might not have thought about watching or might have missed altogether. Although this process doesn’t always work out well either; for every 5 good films I find, there's one pieces of crap. I found out about “Office Space” this way. I rented it, watched it, and was left shaking my head when it was over. All I could think was, so what was all the fuss about?

So, coming soon to a PC in your neighborhood, I will probably write that list of my "FAVORITE MOVIES THAT I WATCHED IN 2004." I will do that type of list because I know you, my dear readers, would want me to do something, because, well, it's the sort of thing one does at the End of the Year, and besides, I know how much you value my opinion.

After all, it’s not like I’m the FOX network or The Enquirer.

WHY?!?

Well, I wrote another letter to the Editor the other day and they didn't publish it. At least, not yet, and it's been about a week already, so I'm not going to hold my breath any longer. I am SO pissed. I have all these great opinions, I send them letters all the time and they NEVER publish any of them. (Okay, they did once. But that was a long time ago, they should have forgotten all about that by now!) Their loss.

And then I read all these stupid letters that they actually do print that make no sense whatsoever. I've seen crap about how many trees they should, or shouldn't, plant in the median strip of some residential street. They go on and on about the most inane topics. And here I am, always sending them letters that are smart and informed and clever and witty, and they don't publish them.

I guess that's why I started this blog. I feel this need to share what I have with the people, and if the news paper won't publish any of it, by gosh, I'll have to do so myself right here.

It's just too bad nobody actually reads any of this.