New TV: The Movies

Today I watched Ocean’s 11 and Star Wars: Episode 1 on my new TV. Two movies I thought would be good on the big screen. I got what I wanted out of both of them.

I have to say, though, that Star Wars made absolutely no sense. Of course I’ve seen it a few times before, but this time I tried to understand what they were talking about.

• The whole Trade Federation thing is much too complex.
• Why didn’t they go back to get Anakin’s mother? The only reason they didn’t get her the first time was because they didn’t have money at the time, however, they should have gone back right away and bought her freedom as well instead of just forgetting about her.
• They can project their holograms and see everything on a planet. Why was the senate saying they couldn’t tell if there was really a war on Naboo? Just look and see. You do it all the time.
• The whole thing with Palpatine creating and then getting a super powerful position is ridiculous. If it were that easy everyone would have tried that long ago.
• The Jedi council seems to have no power. They say they don’t want to have Anakin trained and then Quigon says he’s going to train him anyway and they’re like, “OK, what can we do about it?”
• Anakin’s a little boy and they criticize him for missing his mother. Whatever.
• Anakin is rescued and no plan is made for his care. He’s taken with the Jedi to a planet that’s in the middle of a war into highly dangerous situations. Huh?
• Why is Jar Jar Binks taken around everywhere? Jar Jar gave me chills because he made me think about how messed up George Lucas must be. He’s definitely got issues.

Everything in the movie is like this. I can’t believe what a bad writer George Lucas is. As I was watching I was coming up with alternative plots that both made sense and would accomplish what was needed to tell the story.

I know it’s silly, people have already said all this, I just wanted to get it out.

New TV

I bought my first and, until now, only TV about 15 years ago. It was a 20″ Mitsubishi purchase from Magnolia Hi-Fi while my friend Tara was working there. I think it was about $300.

Before that I had been using the monitor for my Amiga (computer), which had some extra inputs, hooked up to a VCR. It blew up, twice, and I realized that not only was the Amiga pretty much useless at that point, but it was time to get a TV.

For the past 15 years I have had that TV. At first, I kept it because bigger TVs were too bulky. I didn’t want to make room or have to move a giant TV. Then flat panels were too expensive.

But now the stars are aligning and I got a new TV, and it was worth the wait. It’s not a super high end TV, but it’s amazing. First of all it sensed digital and HD channels direct from my cable. I thought you needed a cable box for that, but I guess not. Also it’s downloading TV guide and even automatically lists the names of the channels. Also, the channel numbers are like 9.1 and 12.25. Bizarre. So 9 will be the SD channel, and 9.1 will be the HD version of that channel. This is all so new to me.

It’s surprising to me because I consider myself to be up to date on these things, but apparently I’m not. But I don’t think anyone is. Why did I go pick up cable cards for my new Tivo HD (which is in transit) yesterday if they aren’t necessary? Or are they necessary for some channels?

Either way, I’m very happy with my new TV.

Buffalo Bleu – Kettle Krinkle Cut Chips Suck

I was at Whole Foods yesterday because I buy organic carrots for Kody and organic lettuce for myself. Whole Foods makes products look so good, so decided to be daring and try the Buffalo Bleu flavor of Kettle Krinkle Cut Chips. It was such a bizarre flavor I couldn’t really imagine what it would taste like. But I like buffalo wings and I really like blue cheese.

They are horrible. They are basically like eating heartburn. They taste like what you would imagine heartburn to taste like. They hurt in your mouth. They hurt going down. They hurt in your stomach and they keep hurting. I can’t imagine eating more than five chips in one sitting or the repercussions of such an action.

I am very confused about how these actually got released onto the unsuspecting public. I wonder if it isn’t just some sort of a joke.

Amazon: Buffalo Bleu – Kettle Krinkle Cut Chips

Harry Potter vs. Arianna Huffington

I have been re-reading the Harry Potter books. I’m on the fifth book now. It’s interesting how quickly they take a turn from the innocence of the first book. I was thinking today that many people could have done a better job with the books, in some ways, than J. K. Rowling did. There are so many inconsistencies. However, she brings a magic all her own to the books, and that’s what sells them.

Also, the bad people are so bad and ruthlessly mean to Harry, I wonder if J. K. Rowling has some issues she’s dealing with. Yes, it draws emotion, but I think it’s much more than is needed. It becomes unpleasant at times.

On a not so related note, I was also thinking about Arianna Huffington today. I got back and forth on whether I like her or not. Presently, I don’t like her. She really rode this blogging thing for all it’s worth. A whole bunch of other people created blogging and then she acted like she invented it. And then she writes a book about it, like she’s trying to spread the word and help people.

Please, she’s just a rich woman who married a bisexual oil millionaire and now she thinks she’s the inventor of blogs. And that accent is so fake at this point. She moved to England at the age of 16, Grecian please.

Beside that, The Huffington Post isn’t even a blog. It’s a professional website with purposely bad design to make it appear as if it’s “home grown.” It’s as fake as her marriage and her accent.

It feels good to get that out. Have a nice day.

Comment Stalker

I have something I want to talk about because it sort of disturbs me and I also find it very interesting. I have a comment stalker on Doxie News. A while back we had a huge argument in the comments for a post. She got so personal and insulting that I had to halt comments for the post. After that her and her friends tried posting comments on other posts. Not to continue to the discussion, but to insult me about whatever that other post was about. What’s funny is that those comments would include vicious personal attacks and then accuse me of attacking them somehow. Those comments were deleted.

At first I left the big argument comments because I thought at the end of it all I looked pretty good and she and her friends looked really bad. I was even going to annotate the comments because their comments were so crazy that it was kind of funny. However, when I started annotating, I realized that their comments made no sense, so much so that I couldn’t really even figure out what they were saying. One sentences would contradict their previous sentence or they would say just outrageous things that really made no sense whatsoever. It was exactly the same type of thing as the people who will rant on and on about Barack Obama being a secret Muslim or not being born in the United States.

What I started to realize was that these people were quite possibly mentally ill in some way. Not in a tragic sad way, but in a sort of evil way. And that made me just want to delete the comments even though they made me look good. I didn’t want to clutter up my blog with comments which I couldn’t even parse.

The comments are gone for good, but from memory, they said I was a bad person (literally, they said I was a bad person). That I force fed my dog treats. That my dog wasn’t as close to me as I thought he was. That I was ignorant. And, I love this, that I was personally going to cause an end to everything. That’s right, everything.

This morning, the woman came back again and posted another personal attack comment out of the blue. What’s funny is even though the post had nothing to do with her she also somehow made it out to be a personal attack on her. She said something like, “I don’t do that!” I thought to myself, “Who said you did? This isn’t even about you! In fact it seems pretty clearly to be about people other than you and it’s not even remotely insulting to them either.” I feel like it’s the movie Aliens where you finally get the alien out of the airlock but then it just keeps banging on the door and you wonder if it will ever just go away.

It scares me that there are people like this who are so stuck in their hate that they seem to find something to hate anywhere. I don’t want to get into it, but I think it’s important to note that they were so angry because I was talking about trying to save dogs lives and make dogs healthier. That’s why I think there might be some sort of mental illness at work here, because it doesn’t even make sense. I have learned, but as is the case with many lessons, this isn’t a lesson I thought I was going to have to learn.

The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien Sucks

I just finished watching the monologue from the 3rd Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. It sucked, just like the previous two nights. The jokes aren’t even close to funny, they’re tragic, and not in a good way. Tonight he seemed to resort to desperate insult comedy and it made him look really bad.

The format of all the jokes is this, “In the news we hear that Joan Rivers is trying to sell her Manhattan condo for 25 million dollars. It’s OK though, because we hear it’s had a lot of work done!”

That’s great Conan. I think Johnny Carson told that same joke when he was hosting The Tonight Show.

Here’s the deal, his jokes need to be innovative and interesting now more than ever. If this goes on for another week, I could see them canceling the show. The writers need to be fired or something, because these jokes are just really bad. Half of the time, the audience doesn’t even laugh and I don’t blame them. A couple of times they’ve kind of groaned or been literally silent. It’s very uncomfortable to watch.

He also has Andy Richter back on the show and that’s not working either.

I love Conan but something has got to change.

To make matters worse, considering the whole studio is new, the set is not very interesting. It’s like someone said, “Let’s make a set that looks just like a generic talk show set from 1980, with nothing special. That way we can use it as the set for any talk show we need!”

Maybe they will.

Golden Girls on the Hallmark Channel

Today the Hallmark Channel is running a Golden Girls marathon. It’s been too tempting for me to ignore.

Garage Sales

For the first time in many years, I went to some garage sales. Last weekend a friend of mine had one and I missed it because I was having lunch with another friend, but it reminded me to go. My Mom used to drag me to garage sales every weekend. If I remember correctly, both days of the weekend most of the time, although Sunday was less. Finally she got some friends who also went and thankfully went with them instead. They even started an estate sale business.

I didn’t much like going to garage sales then, mostly because it meant I had to get up early on the weekends. My Mom would also tell me the number of sales, but then if we saw signs we’d probably end up going to those too. I know how great they can be now, and yes we went to extra sales with the signs, although or max total was going to be five or six sales signs or not.

I really had fun today. I was telling Daniel that I had great memories of really good sales that my Mom had for her business. While the quality of today’s sales wasn’t that great, and I’m not that good at picking out the sales yet, it was fun, and I forgot how fun it is just to talk to people and get a closer look at neighborhoods and houses.

I bought a king sized comforter for when my mom comes to visit. It was very clean already and washing machine safe, so I can wash it. I may replace it because it is going on a twin bed (folded in half) but it was from the pottery barn and was only two dollars so I wouldn’t be losing much if I do find a replacement. I can use it on my bed too, I guess.

Daniel got a saddle stapler for a dollar and a painting of Jesus with some children for 75 cents. I think he’s going to use post-it notes to create text bubbles so we can all see the inspiring things Jesus would say.

Jeopardy and your Brain

I started watching Jeopardy this year. I love it. It is the most fascinating game of all because it’s great to play along. I just try to say the answer before the players do. I don’t say it in the form of a question because inevitably I then end up trampling over the contestant and can’t hear what the actual answer was.

There are a couple of phenomena that are very interesting when it comes to playing Jeopary:

How do I know that?

Sometimes you know the answer to a question but have no idea how. The other day, there was a question about a Dutch artist, and I knew the answer was Vermeer. As far as I know, I have never heard of this person. My guess is I heard it on Jeopardy sometime in the past. Bizarrely knowing an answer happens quite often, and it’s a little unsettling.

I do know that!

This is when you know the answer to a question, but you are particularly impressed with yourself for knowing it. For me this often happens with history questions. I’m horrible at history, but I’ll know something about Napoleon or something.

I smart!

This is when you don’t know the answer to the question, but you figure it out from hints in the clue. I didn’t get this one, but tonight one of the questions was asking for a British town in a normal fashion, but then added the phrase, “Steak your claim!” The answer was of course, Salisbury. I think honing this skill is actually the secret of Jeopardy champions.

Major Brain Block

Major brain block is when you know the answer, you just can’t remember what the words are. Tonight I knew the answer to Final Jeopardy was James Dean, I could think of his face and the names Marilyn Monroe, and Sal Mineo, but not the name James Dean. When I heard the answer I recognized it, but it was almost like hearing his name for the first time and I knew somehow his name had left my brain.

Minor Brain Block

This is when you know the answer, you know the words, but something is just going wrong in your brain and you can’t say the words. Given two more seconds, you would be able to, but somehow access to that part of your brain is delayed.

Amazing Brain

This is when you’re on better than ever, you get every question and not even you can believe it’s happening. You’re amazed at how much information one can hold in their brain.

Proud to be wrong.

This most often shows up in Final Jeopardy. It’s when you get the wrong answer, but everyone on the show had the same answer as you did. It’s too bad you didn’t get it right, but you’re in good company.

Playing Jeopardy is a weird window into you’re brain. After they ask the question, the answer sort of appears in your brain like a cloud and it starts to form. You can know you know the answer before you know what the answer is. Sometimes the cloud takes a long time to form, sometimes it’s almost instantaneous. The process of thinking of the answers is weird.

You can sort of imagine what Alzheimer’s would be like, it would be like the cloud would never form into the answer, and you can sort of comprehend how scary that would be. You can also imagine what dyslexia would be like, in a way, if the cloud formed the wrong answer. I know I keep talking about this cloud, but play Jeopardy, you’ll know what I mean. It’s not like you see a cloud, it’s more like an emotion of uncertainty, or pending knowledge. It’s hard to describe.

The Wrestler

I watched The Wrestler last night. It was very hard for me to watch because while I bet most of the people watching might think it was just a story, at its core it was very very true.

The bodybuilding world is a lot like the wrestling world in that movie. It’s two sided. On one side there’s the glory of being an accomplished competitor, and on the other side there’s sitting in an empty room with a stack of DVDs you’re trying to sell. While some of the situations were set up to tell a story in a movie, they were portraying real life. You might not be in an actual empty room, but there’s a stack of DVDs in the corner that nobody wants, which reminds you that you’re not nearly as important as you hoped you’d be.

There’s also the bubble effect, which is portrayed in the movie, but I think was a little underplayed. Otherwise sensible people who don’t know you are likely to invite you to stay at their vacation house after 5 minutes of talking to you. The wrong kind of women are likely to throw themselves at you. In fact, more often the wrong kind of men are too, which I’m surprised they didn’t explore further in the film. However, it was painful enough so I’m glad they didn’t.

These factors keep the person believing they are important while preventing them from developing real relationships and sometimes even real personality skills. When everyone reacts positively to you, why would you think that you don’t have an absolutely great personality? You end up turning away any real relationships because they don’t sparkle as much. You see in the film how much charm Mickey Rourke’s character had. But he was still unable to form real lasting relationships.

Everybody who meets you has a hidden agenda, often one they aren’t even aware of. But when they realize that you aren’t actually superman, or that you can’t save them from whatever they needed to be saved from, the friends betray you, and your wife leaves you, the agents stop calling, and the party’s over. And you’re left with no skills, no job, no money, and nobody. It’s tragic.

As the movie suggests, you’re left with one thing. The thing you actually do well, and even if its ridiculous to try again, financially unwise, or even unsafe, you’ll do it. Because it’s all you’ve got left.

I quickly saw the truth about the bodybuilding world. And what I saw was a bunch of good people who were willing to work hard for a dream, being taken advantage of. With wimpy payouts and no appreciation, a quote from Randy “The Ram” to another younger wrestler really stood out to me.

The people who drive the Cadillacs, the ones with the politics, they run the show. It ain’t about ability so you just hang in there.

If your impression is that this is not the case with professional baseball, basketball, or football, you’re wrong. When there are lots of talented people with dreams to chose from, decisions are made for all sorts of reasons.