Talk to the hand

For the Star Wars fans out there (though you must face facts, Trek is much much better!)

More Finn newz

Remember how I mentioned Neil recording a new album back in October? Well, turns out that Nick Seymour was also in the studio with him, and now thanks to this news article and confirmation/clarification from Peter Green (see this post from the Gryphon himself) we now know that it’s going to be a Crowded House reunion album, complete with Mark Hart! I would be sorely disappointed if Mark hadn’t been included, by the way. And there aren’t really words to describe the lack of Paul. I still can’t believe that I never even got to see them live until after Paul had quit back in 1994.

They’ve also rereleased the Farewell to the World DVD and it’s finally out in the US; I have got to stop putting off my next Amazon order and get the damn thing. (Actually, I almost ordered it straight from Oz earlier this month before seeing in the fine print that it was a Region 4 disc! Disaster averted.)

Could it be true? Solo Tim and Crowded House all in the same year?

A damn good idea

Wish I’d thought of this one: a mitten that has a pocket on the back of the hand that you can put your Charlie Card in. The card scanner can read the card through the mitten, and your hands stay warm. It’s a win-win! Read about it here, and here is another blog that links to the article about the mittens that ran in the Globe last week.

Time won’t give me time

When am I going to grow a spine and cancel my subscription to Time magazine? My major complaint is that over the years they’ve been subtly and gradually changing the tone to one that is less like reporting and more like advertising. I even got torqued up enough last September to send an email accusing one writer of being a shill for a business whose product he reviewed. In the offending “article,” which I don’t feel like identifying because it will just name the damn product another time, was about a new cell phone. After gushing about the phone itself, quoting the manufacturer’s own description of the phone, the writer actually advised buying it now rather than waiting for other providers to offer it because one “may never again find a monthly rate this good.” In this era of uber-crass commercialization, does this kind of plug bother only me? For what it’s worth, I did get a reply to my email, but it was not in any way apologetic and rather defended how cool he thought the phone was. So be warned: Time magazine now carries bought-and-paid-for ads, as well as masquerading-as-articles ads.

The latest misstep is, of course, the now infamous “Person of the Year” issue where it was Us, the DIY You-Tubers who lurve to use teh Internets as our new medium of navel-gazing. Far be it from me to ignore the irony of bitching about it on my blog (and of course I’m also a couple of weeks late and the Eye of the People has certainly moved on by now). But come on. Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-Il, maybe someone involved in that Iraq thing going on, hell, even Vladimir Putin and his growing fondness for trying to bully the world through manipulation of the energy supply. I mean, do I matter even a tiny bit in the grand scheme of things in contrast to the aforementioned dudes? Sure, I love YouTube, sure I dig keeping up with the peeps blog-style. But it ain’t the most important shit that happened last year. Get some perspective, hmm?

So why do I continue to subscribe to this damn mag? Well, there’s certainly inertia at work. And they do a decent job in the front third of the mag to give me the lowdown on the week’s happenings. Hey, maybe I should just cancel until the 2008 presidential campaign starts to heat up. Uh—wait a second...

Hibachi!

Well, it seems as though the last few days have been dedicated primarily to sports in one form or another. First off, the Snorklewacker/Swami household has been consumed with Gilbertalooza, after Arenas sank an unbelievable game-winning shot on Thursday night, then had an insanely expensive birthday party on Friday night (not that I was invited, snif), and in general showed off his phenomenal swag.

Then there was an hour and a half of tennis on Saturday, where we were one court over from Thomas Blake, bro to James and a Boston Lobster. (It’s pretty daunting to play your own crappy game of tennis, involving lots of hitting it into the net and other unforced errors, while the dude next court over is thwacking the ball at a billion miles per hour. Although I did hit an ace, boo yah!)
Finally, today, it was a 19-mile bike ride in the amazing sunny weather. As righteously pissed off as I am about global climate change, I can’t complain about sneaking a cycling session in during January, of all months. Although I do miss the snow and cold weather.
Now, I need a weekend to recover from my weekend. Woof.

I Hate Christmas, Part 2

Well, the annual holiday fiasco is finally over and I’m safely back in the Snorklewacker Cave. Actually, the fiasco rating was quite low this year; much lower than it’s been in the past. One major reason for the relatively low level of stress was that we flew down to the family homesteads instead of driving—no 10 hours of slogging down the East Coast Megalopolis through holiday traffic. Just a couple hours of JetBlue entertaining me with XM radio. Why have we not been flying every year?? Also, the family strife and drama was at a minimum this year for some reason. Overall I managed to see three siblings, three nephews, the new(ish) niece, three siblings-in-law, one parent, one step-parent, two in-laws, and four friends over six days. Whew.
As for gifts, I simply must call out these two hideous apple figurine things for special mockery. Aren’t they awful? Egads. Anybody who wants ’em, they are yours, yours, yours. I ship internationally.

Justin Timberlake in a box

Thanks to Danielle for dropping a dime on this one! NSFW. What are you doing surfing my blog from work, anyway, ya slacker?

I Hate Christmas, Part 1

I need to buy a generic gift for the office Yankee swap on Thursday. At the moment I’m nearly homicidally irritated with half of my co-workers, and therefore not interested in giving any of them a gift, and friendly enough with the other half to know that they are dreading the swap just as much as I am. Blah, what to buy? At this point I think the default is food, although that just screams uninspired. Last year somebody tried the ultimate tacky move and unwrapped his own present. (Although he didn’t count on me taking it from him, heheh!) Hmph, I’m not feeling the holiday cheer over here. Christmas is such a pain in the ass. Well, except for the proliferation of chocolate. But I refuse to look for an upside while I’m in this cranky mood.

Number nine, number nine

My oldest nephew turned nine years old yesterday. Nine! Hell, I vividly remember being nine.

• My oldest sister went to college (I drove down with my parents to move her into the dorm)


• I was in fourth grade, which was when I met my first real best friend


• My 27-year-old (!) somewhat hippie teacher read The Hobbit to us in class


• I learned long division—I remember being so crushed when I found out remainders were just a crutch we’d have to learn to live without


• I procrastinated so long on my science project, which was to build a model of the solar system, that I ended up with one of the crappiest ones in the class


• One of my classmates would solve your Rubik’s Cube for a price (geek hustler!)

The week of my ninth birthday, the #1 pop song was “Centerfold” by J. Geils Band, and E.T. came out three months later (I never saw it, though, can you believe it!). And I should mention that Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom also came out that summer, although I didn’t become hip enough to notice that one until around eight years later.

Nine! So old, so young. Freaky to think about it.

Hieronymus Bosch in a down parka

It’s been cold outside today. Cold in an empty-void-of-outer-space kind of way. I was out there wrapped in my warmest coat, two hats, hands inside gloves inside pockets and I could tell you exactly which square inches of my body were not covered in enough layers. (Ankles, bridge of the nose, toes.) And it’s times like that when you begin to grasp the speck-like insignificance of humanity, that the very air around you is not your friend as it tries to suck the life out of your body and the heat out of your skin. It makes me glad that medieval artists didn’t know about physics, because if they had, the center of the most ghoulish painting or carving depicting the horrific depths of hell would not have Satan at the center, but Thermodynamics, represented by a blank-eyed quadruple-fanged serpent with an empty belly drinking the warm life-force right out of its innocent victims, diamond-studded eyes staring with the cruel impersonality of a relentless, mindless force. (Or maybe I shouldn’t have watched any of Queen of the Damned on basic cable last night, a truly awful movie by one of the more awful writers of paperbacks I loved when I was a teenager, because it’s making me feel Gothic and tragic and positively overwrought. Moreover, to expand this parenthetical aside past the point of reason, Van Helsing was on basic cable tonight and I can confirm that it really sucks. I mean, you can’t even watch it for more than a few minutes at a time because the pain in your head intensifies with every second. Normally good actors acting very badly, bad actors acting badly, special effects that look completely cheesy, David Wenham’s appallingly terrible haircut, etc. Yeesh.)

Now I’ve lost my train of thought. Anyway, it was damn cold today and I’m someone who likes it cold. At the same time, for the next several days I’ll be the only person in this big house and that’s exacerbating this cold feeling. I’ve been blasting the TV and the music, and that helps. The next step is tossing this tiny stone into the giant ocean of cyberspace and causing a couple of ripples to remind the world that I’m over here generating heat, using electricity, and just generally being alive. Hey, remind me not to play “Log Cabin Fever” by Split Enz this week, okay? At least, not until Swami gets back from his trip to China.

Low cloud moving cross the sky

It’s good to know on a cloudy day that the sun is still up there shining.

And no George Clooney, either

I won’t go into any details*, but let me just say that I spent over six hours in the emergency room last Wednesday, and it was no fun at all. Remind me not to complain about car troubles again—medical troubles are far, far more nerve-racking! But all is well, nothing to report, I am a paragon of health. Bring on the leftover pumpkin pie and order me another four-day weekend, stat.

*Okay, if you want a little detail, you can read this.

Showdown at the Woodley Cafe

The night was dark. I was slouching through town, feeling unfamiliar in a crowd of strangers, trying to forget myself amid the crush trying to get noticed. I needed a stiff drink, there was definitely a stiff drink out there who was head over heels for me, and I knew there had to be a place where we could get acquainted. I walked into the nearest bar ’cause the farthest one was too many steps away.

Then I saw them, three goons that weren’t looking for trouble because trouble had heard they were looking and skipped town on the next Chinatown bus. That was trouble’s mistake, because everybody knows the Chinatown bus is as likely to leave you by the side of the road with your luggage on fire and soaked with antifreeze as drop you on a stinking street corner with a chopstick up your nose and a wonton up your ass. But never mind that. Back to the goons. It was like the Dating Game in one of Chuck Barris’s cocaine-fueled fever dreams: Bachelor #1 was probably the one they called the Kid, his innocent face all smiles after beating the latest murder rap with the help of a few guys named Ben Franklin. Bachelor #2 looked like he dug his bivouac next door to the Unabomber and made his own moccasins out of Ted Nugent’s hide. And Bachelor #3, well, he was the softspoken one, which means he might ask your opinion of Freddy Adu but shiv you even if he agreed with your take on the kid. I knew I should have kept on walking past that dive but then I caught their eye and it was too late to leave early.

The Shiv gestured to a seat next to him and I had to sit down. At that moment the waitron cashed in her years of training and asked for drink orders.

“What Scotch do you have?” the Shiv asked, and I hoped for my own sake she had whatever swill he was hoping to swig.

“We got Jack Daniels,” she responded, and then I knew it was all over for her and me both.

Then the Kid leaned forward. “They say you got quite an arm.”

“Do they,” I responded, playing it cool. If things went my way I might have a chance at getting out of there without it being feet first. “I wonder if they know what they’re talking about.”

Unabomber looked up from his half-sized glass of beer. I wondered if I was dressed as Dorothy because that bar was sure starting to look like Oz. “You see this nose?” He pulled a giant plastic nose out of his pocket and slammed it on the table.

Now I knew I was in crazytown but I thought it best not to point that out to the natives. “Yeah, I see that nose.”

“You beat the Kid at arm-wrestling, you get the nose. You lose, Shiv here gets yours.”

“Simple proposition,” I remarked. It might have confused the teetotaling waitron but it was crystal clear to me. “Let’s go for it.”

I clasped hands with the Kid and we planted our elbows on the table. At first, he was holding back on me, I could tell, letting me wear myself out early and then he could swoop in for the kill. So I kept it low-key, not showing off, knowing that the longer it went the more likely I would keep one of my favorite facial features. Actually, who am I kidding, I’m not a huge fan of my nose but I wasn’t ready to give it up for adoption to that bunch of jokers.

Time was ticking by and the Kid was looking a little less confident. I didn’t have him yet, though. I just kept my eyes on that nose and hoped that my arm didn’t leg out. At last I saw him start to crumble like Big Dig concrete, and finally I banged his arm to the table harder than Woody Hayes punched out Charlie Bauman in the Gator Bowl.

For a minute it was quieter than a room full of people sleeping through Elvis Costello’s North. Then I stood up, picked up the nose, and gave a salute. I figured I’d hit the road before their patience ran thin like Gene Keady’s combover. “Here’s to otolaryngology,” I said, picking up my drink and draining it in one shot.

That was one hell of a night in Washington, D.C.

Notes: cross-posted to Costello-l; visit here for a couple more pics!

Movie review: The Prestige

It’s been a long time since I went to a movie and walked out immediately wanting to see it again. (Maybe Kung Fu Hustle?) This was one of them. I’m not going to go into plot details, because there are a lot of surprises and I don’t want to spoil any of it. But I will tell you that this was one of the best constructed plots I’ve seen, every performance was excellent (due to my various biases I’m obliged to spend a whole paragraph later on one particular actor; see below for that), and there wasn’t a single moment where I looked at my watch. I also ended up thinking about it for the rest of the weekend, which is rare because I often slip into an irrational funk after seeing movies.

(By the way, over here I promised Frantix at some point that I’d deliver my verdict on The Departed, but in truth I was so lukewarm about that movie that I couldn’t really motivate myself to write a review. That is review enough, I think. Well, while I’m on the subject, I’ll just say that the performances were excellent, but the plot was botched in the last quarter of the movie and therefore I was terribly disappointed. Leo deserves Oscar consideration, though.)

In a rare girly moment for me, I must confess that this movie led me to believe that the best job in the world is probably designing costumes, and this film was a showcase for some great ones. There’s nothing like the Victorian era for waistcoats, ascots, corsets, and hats of various shapes and sizes. I wonder what the line-item in the budget was for top hats, for example. Christian Bale should be firing his agent, because he got majorly shortchanged by being stuck in prison greys for a large portion of the proceedings. I also loved the set dressing. Can you imagine being in charge of something so major, in that everything you do is on display and captured forever on film, but so minor, in that few people probably ever notice the vases on the shelf behind a character while he’s talking? It’s kind of mind-blowing when you think about it.

And now, the promised/threatened paragraph on Hugh Jackman. The first thing to say is that he has appeared in some of the most awful flicks that have ever been imposed on humanity (here of course I’m talking about Swordfish and Van Helsing, yikes). The next thing to say is that I’m nonetheless incredibly biased in his favor because of the X-Men movies. (That’s 1 and 2; let’s imagine that 3 was scrapped after Bryan Singer left.) But after that full disclosure I think it’s safe to report that the dude can act. Even in some very tense emotional scenes, he really pulled it off. Look, I got through almost the whole paragraph without mentioning that there is a shirtless scene (insert fangirl swoon here).

But I’m tiptoeing around the major points of discussion because I want you to see the damn movie, not read my effusive ramblings on it. Go. Go, already, if only so I can discuss the plot with you afterwards. And buy an extra ticket for me so I can go again.

Drop the thesaurus, pal

That word doesn’t mean what they think it means.

Wow

So the Democrats actually managed to do it. I’m amazed, surprised. When I went to bed on Tuesday night they were calling the House for the Dems, but it didn’t look like the Senate was going to happen. And that seemed to be confirmed on Wednesday, when the two states without a firm result turned out to be Montana and Virginia. I knew better than to think of Virginia as a blue state, after growing up there. But it actually happened! The change I’ll be happiest to see is one that seems minor, but could very well have a huge impact: now that each party controls a branch of government, I expect the media to stop playing GOP lapdog and give the Democrats the voice that they’ve been denied for the last six years. With Democrats controlling committees, they’ll regain some control of what the media reports. What a relief that will be after watching the media treat every despicable piece of GOP spin like actual news.

The other result that is close to my heart is in South Dakota. If voters in one of the most conservative corners of the country can vote down an anti-abortion law, then I can truly believe that this country leans pro-choice. Perhaps that’s asking for too little, but at this point even the smallest hint of affirmation means a lot. Way to go, South Dakotans!

Blogger says: no birthday for you!

My post wishing Sashe a happy birthday, posted on the exact day and everything, has just disappeared. I have just spent the last half hour saving all my damn posts, in case the whole thing goes up in smoke someday. Fellow bloggers, if you have any interest in posterity, I guess this proves you don’t leave it up to Blogspot.

Autumn almanac

Thought I’d share the pics I took this past Sunday on a bike ride. This first one is looking downstream at the Charles River, with the Prudential Center visible in the center.

Thanks to the lovely and talented Erin giving us windproof vests, 45F is not too cold to go cycling, for the record! And thanks to the National Weather Service’s wind chill index, I can confirm that when you’re riding 20 mph in 40 degree weather, it feels like it’s below freezing. Hardcore, baby.

This is the Weeks Footbridge looking downstream, with both the Hancock tower and the Pru visible in between the yoogly concrete high-rises.


And the third pic is looking upstream at the same bridge.

For once, the Luddites are right

I’ve had my head down for the last few days trying to keep the workload at bay, but I thought I’d pop in long enough to comment that America is doomed. Of course I’m talking about electronic voting machines, which are not even a good idea in theory (does no one see the crucial need for an actual paper trail?) and a total nightmare in practice. I direct you to Ars Technica and Time magazine for hair-raising discussion.

I also have been gritting my teeth and scrunching my eyes shut over all the hoopla about the Republicans supposedly losing their grip on power—not because I wouldn’t want to see it happen, but because indulging in any exuberance before the actual results come in is, well, irrational. It’ll be bad enough if the supposed rout doesn’t happen, I don’t want to compound the pain by feeling giddy and expectant for this next week. Would anyone care to join me in this soundproof room?

Finn newz

This is rapidly becoming unbalanced in favor of Finn things, but anyway I just found Tim’s blog on MySpace. It’s kind of funny to see him writing on that site, it just seems like such a breathless teen hangout with all the emoticons, but hey, what do I know. I also am a little unsure of that first single, which seems excessively happy. (Watch the vid on YouTube) I’m going to have to offset it by listening to Nine Inch Nails or something.

I also heard that Neil’s finished recording his album at Real World in the UK—I’m just glad it isn’t taking him six years to do it, as it always does for the most habitual denizen of Real World.

OMG Neil r0x0rs!!1!!
Current mood: abliquafregious