Movie Title Mash-Ups

Some years back when we lived in the same zip code, Steven Marsh and I used to play a mash-up game with movie titles.  I don’t think it every had a real name, but it was something to do on the long drive to the yo-yo championships and cons and so forth.  The idea was to conjoin two movie titles which had a common word at one’s beginning and the other’s end (for clarity’s sake, I’ll underline the common word).  I think my personal best was “The Unbearable Lightness Of Being John Malkovich”.

I may have mentioned that we did this while driving.  Obviously, we were very bored. 

A Moment From My Sordid Past

Sometime back in the early days of mass blogging (the late 90’s, I think), I occasionally wandered around through other people’s blogs.  From time to time, I would post a comment.  Yes, I’m going somewhere with this.  Be patient.

I remember posting comments on the blog of this one girl from Seattle, some riot-grrl wannabe who was always posting about the band she was in and her car and her job and some skinny sunlight-averse guy she was crushing on and so forth.  She seemed to be under the impression that every moment of her life was a profound moment, worthy of lengthy observations . . . which is reasonable, given that she was maybe 21 or 22.  I posted a comment at one point that referred to her as being goth, which I thought was a reasonable inference, given that she was cross-posting her stuff to some goth site or somesuch. 

A day later, I checked her blog and she had replied that she wasn’t goth.  Instead, she rattled off a list of things that characterized her (riot grrl, technophile, etc.), but that really she was too complex for any pigeonhole.  She said, with a tinge of pride and a bit of arrogant challenge, that people were always trying to put her into a box and then were surprised that she didn’t fit.  I replied that anyone can fit into a box; it just depends on how much cutting needs to be done.

A day later, I checked her blog and she had disabled the ‘comment’ function for non-members.

 

 

Heavy Sigh

Tired.  Haven’t posted much in recent weeks for several reasons.  First and foremost, of course, is my ongoing status as a lazy bastard.  Others include working on of other writing projects, dealing with assorted work and home issues, and most recently a looooong drive to deliver the bunnies to a new home.  Of course, you don’t know anything about the bunnies, probably.  Sweet, adorable, and just not suited to our lifestyles, the bunnies were an unexpected addition to our home.  About this time last year, actually. 

Recently, by which I mean yesterday, we were finally able to pass the bunnies on to someone who would give them the attention they deserved.  It took a while, but we finally found someone who fit the bill, and so we found ourselves driving several hours to deliver them.  And the huge pile of miscellany that went with them (food, litterboxes, toys, a 5′x5′x3 cage . . . ).  Then we set it all up for them.  Then we chatted for a while to be sure they were appropriate to the task.  Then we drove home.   All in one day.  We got home about 3 AM. 

And there was the Thursday night/Friday morning adventure with Bucky, aka “the little green feathered bastard who doesn’t know how goddamned good he has it.” 

I’ll get these stories.  I promise.  I’m just a wee bit tired right now. 

 

P.S.  Did I mention I have gay fish? 

Bad Suggestions

One of my co-workers is going to be giving birth to a girl in a month or so.  She said that she and her husband are having trouble coming up with girl names, so I promised I’d provide a list of completely unsuitable names.  I don’t think she took me seriously.

 

Nevertheless,   I came up with a list.  Most of these names are saints drawn from Saints Preserve Us (Sean Kelly & Rosemary Rogers, 1993 Random House).  For these particular selections I have included that saint’s feast day and, when available, the recognized areas of patronage or maybe some other useful note, as long as I can keep that entry to one line. 

 

A Memorial Day Observance

Headline:  Bush Calls On Americans To Remember War Dead

Subtext:  And Overlook That He’s Responsible For 4,000 Of Them

Suckitude

Yep, life is a big barrel o’ crap right now. 

As I type this, my wife Amy is in Prescott, Arizona.  She’s trapped in a house with her mother, Penny, and her mother’s significant other, Roger, with no escape until her flight home on Thursday.  I, on the other hand, am trapped in our home with three birds, two cats, two rabbits, three boxes of fish, 1.5 metric craploads of plants, and a loaned DVD of “Grandma’s Boy” that I have to watch before Tuesday. 

There’s plenty of things that need doing around here, and I’m not getting a goddamned thing done.  I’ve always be pretty lousy at time management, so I’ve set myself a couple of particular goals to accomplish before Amy gets back.  If I can get that short list done, then anything else is gravy. 

Task one:  get together the physical set-up for my new 55 gallon tank.  Since that much water will weigh in excess of 500 lbs, it needs a fairly strong stand.  We settled on the cheapo version, consisting of cinderblocks, planks, and plywood.  The wood needs waterproofing, the blocks need painting, and all of it has to be done outside unless I want to kill the pets. 

Task two:  finish GTA: San Andreas.  I try not to play this one around Amy, but not for the reasons you think.  As far as violence goes, GTA:SA has nothing on Manhunt2, which is a vicious, bloody mess of a game.  It’s because I tend to reference the character’s speech when I’m playing the game.  CJ, the protagonist, is an urban gangbanger, while I am a somewhat unholy combination of tweedy academic and white trash.  Consequently, ‘urban’ colloquialisms sound exceedingly odd coming from me.  Amy does so much eye-rolling that I’m afraid she’ll sprain something. 

So that’s my plan for the next few days.  Gonna suck. 

 

Unproductivity

Sorry, haven’t blogged anything in a while.  Part of it is that when I’ve had free time, I just haven’t been up to any serious effort to write anything.  Part of it is that I haven’t had much free time.  My wife Amy is going to be leaving town for about ten days, and it’s going to really suck.

Her mother recently sold her place, despite the market downturn, and is going to be moving across the country.  And, of course, she needs Amy to help her move.  So Amy wil be helping her load up her stuff and drive it from Florida to Arizona. 

As fate would have it, I’ve been having to put in some work at my parents’ place for the last couple of weeks.  Just an hour or so a day, but it eats into my free time with Amy, which would be less of a problem if she weren’t about to disappear for a week and a half. 

If nothing else, I’ll probably get a bit more blogging done while she’s gone.  Maybe I’ll clean.

Quick Note

I’ve added a number of back-posts, older stuff from Anguiano Held Hostage and from Dispatches From The Front Yard.  New readers might like to browse some that for the humor, invective, backstory, etc. 

Denise challenged me to come up with a “red-head flavoured top ten list”, since her husband’s 40th birthday is coming up next month.  I’m still working on it.  Boy, these Irish get so tetchy when they’re sober. 

Wright & Wrong; or The Mendacity Of Hope

 

 

Once again, the right Reverend Jeremiah Wright is in the news.  On Monday, he addressed the National Press Club over breakfast.  The National Press Club (in my recollection) usually gives thirty minutes to a speaker, followed by about twenty minutes of answering questions (submitted on index cards) from the press, which are read by the moderator (in this instance Donna Leinwand).   Upon his introduction, Wright received a standing ovation from the crowd, which packed the room, so that many attendees had to stand along the walls.  His speech was repeatedly met with enthusiastic applause. 

This is the problem with listening to these events on the radio.  If this were a televised event, then you could see that the thunderous applause was provided solely by the Wright supporters who dominated the crowd.  What might have initially seemed to be a neutral, intellectually critical audience was in fact overwhelmingly displaced by a group of people who were there solely for the support and defense of Reverend Wright.  Without that understanding, you might mistakenly think that Wright was being applauded by actual members of the National Press Club.

Which is not to say that members of the Club do or do not support Reverend Wright, for whatever reasons they may have.  My point is simply that a speaking engagement before the National Press Club doesn’t usually become a call-and-response sermon. 

Ben Stein’s Monkey

  

            With the release of “Expelled:  No Intelligence Allowed”, it’s official:  Ben Stein is a dickhead. 

            I have not seen this movie and have no intention of seeing it.  I’ve read a number of reviews and descriptions and so I feel reasonably certain that I have a sufficient understanding of the matter to make an informed choice.  This is apparently a right-wing anti-evolution polemic that masquerades as a documentary on the academic stifling of Intelligent Design as a valid theory.  The grand guignol of Stein’s thesis is a stroll through Dachau while musing how Darwinism can lead to death camps. 

            Nice one, Ben. 

Need I point out the way religion has been used to justify a long, long, long list of atrocities?  No, because it’s pretty obvious.  Except to Ben. 

I’m not going to rehash the Evolution v. ID debate.  I’ll limit myself to the observation that I have difficulty accepting any school of thought that can only prove itself by the piecemeal refutation of something else.  Consequently, I can’t accept Intelligent Design (or Creationism, for that matter) as anything more than wishful thinking. 

As a side note, ID advocates publically insist that they don’t have a religious agenda, yet they get all pissy when you suggest that it was Martians.  Start in with Chariots Of The Gods and they’ll just stop talking to you.    

 

And, no, I haven’t seen any Michael Moore movies.  Simply put, I try to stay informed on these issues.  If I watched any of the movies (Moore’s or otherwise) on these issues, I would only get even more pissed off without actually learning anything new.