The Room is playing at E Street cinemas. I was watching the trailer and it seemed like a real, sorta boring movie, up until they showed the line "You're tearing me apart Lisa!" Red flag. That line dregs up a memory of discussion I read somewhere about a terrible film. Then I checked out this roof scene clip. Hilariously terrible. Definitely not seeing this bs at E street. Though I wonder if they'd do that same song and dance beforehand by the theater's manager about how movies are high art and you should join their movie club.

I just laughed harder than I have in a month at some of the amazon reviews of The Room. Thinking of buying the dvd.

edit: Not gonna see it in the theater, but did just order the dvd. That whole "I did not hit her! I did not! Oh, hi Mark" just gets funnier and funnier.

(from a amazon user review of the Room)
"I find that the movie makes more sense to me if I imagine that the character of Johnny is actually mentally challenged, but everyone is too polite to say this explicitly."

I'm listening to Les Miserables. Every time I listen to it I have to skip Master of the House. What a terrible, out of place song. Seems to have very little to do with the story, and whole bouncy feel of the song is definitely out of place. I guess it's supposed to break the mood after the Castle on a Cloud downer (which I could also do without. Listening to little girls babble about imaginary things is never interesting), but they could have done it in a way that matched the feel of the rest of the songs. Something with a slower beat and not as desperately humorous. Ugh.

(urban dictionary definition of "anime")
The most retarded s*** ever. The characters eyes are big and the women dress half naked and their boobs practically pop out of their tight usually school girl outfits. Retarded plots that are confusing and make daytime soap operas look like kindergarten math as far as understanding goes. The characters mouth are non-existent when talking, but when laughing become huge. Also everyone that watches it is lame and immature as hell. They talk in cutsey voices and make me want to bitch slap them. Also there's porno of it, which is f***ing clown shoes since you can get real porno everywhere.

I bought this sweet Captain Marvel shirt and wore it outside for the first time Friday. Some kid passing me said "Hey it's Billy Baston!" I was unprepared and didn't have any good response to give him. I just said "What? Oh, eh, yep!" So lame. Next time I'll shout: "World's mightiest mortal!" And all the comic nerds within earshot will cheer. Ah, nerd solidarity.

I'm sufficiently worried about the end of the quarter now that for the next 4 weeks I'm going to do no private movies or TV watching in my apartment. I'm still going to allow it for social occasions (mostly just Friday Night Lights these days) because I'm solitary enough. Need to do 204% from now on.

(Sean in Vietnam told us a story about his friend getting pulled over for speeding)
Sean: He rolled the window down and told the cop, "Ticket or lecture. Not both."

The perfect exercise music mix can be made from the Nine Inch Nails album The Broken. You might think The Downward Spiral would make a better mix because it's a better album, but I think it's too complex with too much variety. After you cut out the intro tracks and some of the instrumental tracks, The Broken becomes 30 minutes of angry nihilism set to a frantic pace. This occurred to me earlier today when I was randomly listening to the album on the metro at rush hour, and almost started moshing in the crowded train because it's so energizing. People gave me concerned looks but I kept it all under control. I did 2 miles on the elliptical tonight, instead of the usual 1 or 1.25 miles. I am a champion.

(from the Weatherman)
Dave Spritz: But the whole thing about all of it, all the getting hit with stuff, the whole thing is, who gets hit with a f***ing pie, anyway? Did anyone ever throw a pie at Thomas Jefferson? Or Buzz Aldrin? I doubt it. But this is like the ninth time I got-
[pause]
Dave Spritz: Clowns get hit with pies.

Today I tried a Kirkland Mocha instead of the starbucks Frappuccino. It was shelved right next to the frappuccinos, comes in exactly the same shaped glass bottle, and possibly costs a little less (though it's not exactly inexpensive). Meh. It's not as bad as the foreign mocha bottled drinks you can find at wholefoods (who make full use of the excuse that they're foreign by tasting quite terrible), but it's not good and definitely not as tasty as a frappuccino. If I wanted something that tasted bad I'd drink redbull.

This is the second time I've been unfriended by Lindsay on facebook. She used to be married to the other Joe, and we exchanged a few messages a couple years ago after he told me they got married. Then one day I discovered that she and Joe were now divorced and she had unfriended me. I sent her a message: "Unfriended! You cut me deep Lindsay.." She responded that after the divorce she was culling her friends list, and had thought that I was just friends with her because of Joe. But then we were friends again. It looks like I've now been unfriended once again. She's engaged to another guy and I guess she's doing more culling of friends. This time I won't object. It shouldn't take constant effort to stay friends with someone on facebook. Online friendships are supposed to be easier than that. Her fiance's blog has some artsy naked photos of her on there. Weird.

(comments for the youtube video of the Skins characters singing Wild World at the end of season 1)
LauraGarciaCervantes: i hate hate hate how they removed this from the dvd. f***ing copyright. i dont even understand why, i mean, it was MADE. why not ADD it. Cat Stevens, if you had anything to do with this i am very displeased

I rewatched most of Friday Night Lights today while I cleaned. Though my recording was kinda screwed by the storm and cuts out sometimes.

Some criticisms though:

Why didn't Coach Taylor just tell Tammy that he didn't know that Luke's mailbox was in front of an empty field? Because he didn't know until Buddy showed it to him and told him who lived there. Furthermore, why would it matter whether Luke's real address was in East Dillon district in past years, when the high school was completely shutdown and non-operational? Why would the mailbox have even been there if the whole area was zoned for Dillon High? They wouldn't have needed it.

It doesn't make sense that people would put a bunch of surrender flags in the coach's front yard. There was nobody in the stands for the football game, the students don't care at all about playing for the football team. The entire east Dillon community has been portrayed as unsupportive and uncaring about the football team. Parents of the players don't care when the coach shows up at the house, and students don't even stop playing basketball when the coach is trying to talk. Then suddenly they're outraged enough about a football game forfeit to go put up white flags in the coach's yard? Inconsistency. When the community doesn't care, it doesn't care. At my high school we never heard about football games except at the occasional rally. A forfeit wouldn't have even started a conversation, let alone inspired enough anger to go stake flags in the coach's front yard.

I had no idea that the random guy who stops Coach Taylor at the gas station and starts babbling was some famous coach. I wonder if most viewers knew. That scene just seemed out of place and unlikely. Some random guy recognizes the coach and start spewing metaphors about inner pirates and how to swing a sword. It was out of place and random, and neither I nor the coach could believe it was happening.

I also didn't like the scene where Tim's brother starts yelling at him in the car shop. I guess people sometimes explode with stress, but it felt too out of place because it was such a short scene. We had like about 5 seconds of regular time in the mechanic shop before Tim asks about getting paid, and then like a 2 minute explosion by the brother about all his issues, and then end of scene. It just wasn't subtle enough for me.

I do like this bicycling girl that Landry backed into. She looks like Tyra, but is even hotter!

Wait, in the last scene Coach Taylor apologizes to Tami for lying! So he did know about the mailbox and fake address, even though Buddy had to show it to him and then tell him what it was, and even though the mailbox wouldn't have mattered in past years because of East Dillon not being open. Crazy.

me: Me First and the Gimme Gimmes do a great cover of this song.
Kate: Do they do anything besides covers?
me: No. Just covers. But they do punk covers of non-punk songs, so it's really like new material.
Kate: So they're kind of like Eric's band.
(oh snap!)

An explanation of the 4 possible interpretations of "a friend in need is a friend indeed". I always thought it meant the third definition, but the first two seem more likely now.

I hate how yahoo sneaks stupid articles about UFC into their news headlines as though it's real news. "Huge upset at UFC!" I don't care. Apparently yahoo is somehow sponsored by UFC, but I'm tired of these "article" ads being interspersed in there. Mostly because I'm tempted to click on them. Also I hate how after you click out of yahoo mail, it brings you to the yahoo main webpage, but then you have to wait before typing any new URL into the window. After a few seconds the page finishes loading (or finishes the intentional delay, if yahoo is being sneaky) and the cursor automatically jumps down to the search bar. So you'll think you're typing a URL but then you're suddenly typing in the yahoo search. Huge pain in the ass. Lots of times I end up yahoo searching for a website whose URL I know because I just type it all out and hit return before the page finishes loading.

(A science blog entry about the thermodynamics of Goldilocks & the Three Bears, and Mama Bear's porridge being too cold)
The only way that the story can make sense is if, for some reason, the Mama Bear has the smallest portion of porridge. In which case, this is a story with a very different moral than the original-- it's a story about the oppression of the Mama Bear, either because the patriarchy is forcing her to eat only the scraps left behind after her husband and child have had their fill, or because the unhealthy woodland media culture has saddled her with a negative body image, leading to an eating disorder.

I watched District 9 last night. (Spoiler alert!) Decent movie, but not stellar. None of the characters were particularly interesting and the whole alien situation seemed a little unexplored. How are their weapons so powerful, yet nobody is exploiting the aliens to have them use the weapons? Why wasn't the mothership fully dismantled and reverse engineered? We just let it sit there undisturbed for 20 years? The floating-ship technology sounds useful. I bet the script's first draft had the aliens having no useful technology, but then the studio said "This won't work in an alien movie. We need some guns! And big robot suits! That Transformers movie made a lot of money.."

I also find it unlikely that the extremely powerful fluid fuel needed to propel the ship is also coincidentally the fluid used to change humans into aliens (and back again). These are two highly specialized and unrelated functions. It'd be like discovering that diesel gas will change turtles into birds. It just seems unlikely.

(from a review of Ctrl+Alt+Del comics)
Ethan is the wacky one like all get out. He built a robot - OUT OF X-BOXES! LMAO HEUG. He talks about giraffes and cheese! LMAO RANDOM. He cavorts and gibbers and acts like he should be in an institution. His antics are supposed to elicit a laugh, but... how? It's so over the top, so wholly pathetic, that you just can't. It's not like watching someone who is naturally, gracefully funny in person. It's like watching someone desperately act the clown so you'll accept him. He flings himself out of windows, burns himself, cuts himself, walks into accident after accident and if you zoom in real close you can see the glistening tears in his eyes and he silently whispers for you to accept him so he won't be so lonely anymore. But you don't, because he's a f***ing idiot.

My old officemate Josh is heading down to Buenos Aires for some reason. Lauren and Doug have been down there since January and my mom keeps saying that I should go visit them. I don't know though, something about Buenos Aires seems uninviting. It seems like going to an expensive Mexico, except the flight is 4 times as long and the food isn't as good. Whitney and I are tentatively planning on visiting Courtney in London and that sounds like a lot more fun. Heck, I already speak English! And the food and weather might not be great, but there's some kind of draw to actually mingling with British people in their natural habitats. See if it's really like Snatch and Lock Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels portray it.

(after we played pool with two guys random from New Zealand)
Dave: I thought the tall blond one was annoying.
me: Oh, he was alright. It was pretty funny how right after he was telling us how the New Zeland women were ugly, his girl friend comes in and she actually is quite ugly.
Dave: Yeah. She was just not attractive at all!

The stages of a breakup. This is the only article I've seen that didn't have links to astrology pages or something else that made me think they were making stuff up. My emotions these days have seen a high variance than usual and I'm tracking their progress to make sure I'm not heading toward any unusual emotional imbalance.

I did score well above average on the Neurotics Anonymous test of mental and emotional health. I'm not sure what that really means besides that the test says I'm okay. Is there an objective, quantifiable value to being emotionally healthy? I suppose if you measured how much people bitched in forums about random things, you would find that I complain less than most people. Sometimes I read forums and find posts where super fans of a game or movie franchise are foaming at the mouth about some piece of news. I think you can tell a person has issues by his energetic ranting in forums (or facebook) about, um, anything. Generally nobody reading those posts can do or will do anything about your complaints, and everybody knows that. You're just constantly venting your impotent frustration, and it's not a healthy sign... I guess it's sorta like this blog..

(from xkcd explained)
While attending a small birthday party for an acquaintance, the Author and four other white young-adults were in the early rounds of a game of Settlers of Catan. During a lull in the fast-paced excitement of the game, one of the four males playing the game jokingly suggested they instead play “strip Settlers of Catan,” in the hopes that he would possibly get to see the bra of the female player. During the awkward and strained laughter, it dawned on the Author that this concept was humorous.

Craigslist should have an option where it can automatically disable your post after X people have sent you emails or after a time period that's shorter than 7 days. This would be handy in the "free" section, where you'll get 5 emails per minute from scavangers hoping for free goods. I feel bad if I don't respond to people with at least "sorry, it's sold," but even that turns into a hassle pretty quickly.

Apparently Cue Bar is now some kind of dance hall. It's a shame, cue bar was a nice and quiet place for drinks, pool and ping pong. I guess it probably shut down because it was too quiet. Bummer.

Joe: I'm sure Duke is concerned about your facebook postings.
Whitney: Hey, my posts go out to 700 people. I could take that school down if I wanted to!

The day after I buy lettuce for the first time EVER, and there's a lettuce recall because of e. coli. Maybe it's a message. It is my destiny not to eat salads.

Tonight is the Friday Night Lights season premier. I went through almost all over season 3 on netflix this week, trying to catch up. Now I wish I still had the cowboy hat I bought for halloween 2 years ago because it would be perfect.

(about our high school reunion)
(12:22:08 AM) me: it's at a bar in santa rosa.
(12:22:12 AM) Dan: my fear would be nobody would remember me
(12:22:21 AM) me: why would that bother you?
(12:22:30 AM) me: all these people whose lives you changed :)
(12:22:42 AM) me: you won't remember them either.
(12:22:47 AM) Dan: you're a mean drunk
(12:22:56 AM) Dan: the sad thing is i do

I thought my haircut came out pretty well. Puja gave it her "looks like every other haircut you get" review which I didn't appreciate. But I guess it does. She thinks you reach an age where you should just stick with your accepted haircut. (Puja thinks I've reached this age and my shaved head didn't count as a different hairstyle. It was the same style, just shorter.) But I'm not ready to surrender yet! Maybe for halloween I'll dye my hair again. Or if I see Doug this christmas maybe I'll get a mohawk to match his. The world is still my hair's oyster.

Today my wireless was being finicky so I was going through the logs and I noticed a device I didn't recognize. Someone named DEL001599200A1D was stealing my wireless! Spent some time looking through router settings trying to figure out how to either set up MAC address control or manual DHCP so I could block extraneous IP addresses (he'd already cracked my password security, and changing that would mean putting it all back into the ps3, wii, etc, which is a huge pain). This is the router the office gave me and it didn't seem to really have easy options for either. Fussed around for like 30 minutes and then it dawned on me that DEL001599200A1D is my network printer.

The coffee in the little market in the basement went from $1 to $1.15! First of all, a 15% increase seems excessive. Is coffee really getting more expensive these days? It's not even special coffee, they just get the regular stuff from safeway and mix it up. I guess maybe they're making up for 6 years of no inflation increase. But the second (and more significant) issue is that now you can't just pay with a single bill, you have to go fishing through you pockets for change! I wish they had instead decreased the size of the cups by 15%. I never fill mine up all the way anyway because I drink 2/3s of it at most. Screw that place. From now on I'm going to starbucks.

Watching Soldier's Girl from netflix. Before putting it into the dvd player I had a moment of hesitation where I considered that the netflix plot synopsis might have conveyed the entire story so there was no point in even watching the dvd. A soldier falls in love with a transvestite and gets murdered by his homophobic soldier comrades. Interesting news story, not an interesting movie. Luckily, while the summary is accurate, there's more to it than that. The netflix reviewers describe it as an incitement of Don't Ask Don't Tell but it doesn't really touch on that specifically. It only portrays the policy as fostering an underhanded homophobia and ignorance in the military, which I'd imagine it does. Shawn Hatosy does a great job playing the victim's roommate and best friend. His character is a volatile combination of extremes and he has some great moments in the film. That actor usually plays pretty similar thug characters, but he really layers this character well. This movie is twice as good as I thought it'd be, and I think it's all because of him.

In other news, I've been using an electric toothbrush for a few days now. My first use of it was similar to putting an electric egg beater in your mouth and turning it on. It was a good thing I was standing over the sink because saliva and toothpaste went everywhere. Now I've got the mess mostly contained, but I'll have to wait a few weeks to see if it's really helping my teeth (mostly on the stain level because my cavities are already under control).

(from the weatherman)
If you want your father to think you're not a silly f***, don't slap a guy across the face with a glove. Because if you do that, that's what he will think, unless you're a nobleman or something in the 19th century, which I am not.