Category: Movies

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle

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The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle trailer

I really want to see this movie. It looks so beautifully weird and interesting. I remember that head janitor guy from Rat Race. I’ve watched the trailer 3 times now. I can’t wait to see this one. It’s in my Netflix queue.

Speaking of movies, we saw Mall Cop this weekend. Despite a lot of very obvious plot holes that even my kids were spotting, it was a fun movie and we really enjoyed it. I was surprised at what a clean movie it was. I expected the usual dose of bad language, fart jokes and general raunchiness for this type of movie, but there was none of that. It was unexpected. My mouth is still in pain from the crazy amount of butter salt we put on the popcorn. (We always bring our own.)

I discovered a new comic today that I really like. It’s called Being Five and it kind of reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes. Both me and Payton read every single one of them from the blog today. Here’s a sample:

The Dark Knight was stupid

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Last week, I decided to finally watch The Dark Knight. I saw Batman Begins in the theater a few years ago and thought it was okay. And all I’ve heard this year is how The Dark Knight is a masterpiece and Heath is brilliant as the Joker and blah blah blah. I actually left my laptop upstairs so I’d have no distractions while watching this amazing film. And it sucked. It was two hours of complete boredom. I kept wanting to turn it off. I can’t believe people went so nuts about that movie. What a piece of garbage. I’m so glad I didn’t waste my money to see it in the theater.

I ran 3 miles straight again tonight. Maybe I’ll be able to do that daily now.

The whole Richard Cardo/Jonbenet Ramsey murder thing got incredibly hilarious again today. I decided to write to Patty, some girl who Richard decided lured Jonbenet out of her room as I cowered under Jonbenet’s bed before going downstairs to write the ransom note. We wrote at least a dozen emails to each other, both finding the whole thing equally hilarious and bizarre. We swapped a lot of good info with each other and it turns out we know several of the same people since we’ve run in similar social circles in the past.

Richard finished his video investigation on the Jonbenet Ramsey murder a day or two ago. It’s taken him years to complete (at least 4 years of his life that I know of) and he’s really poured a lot of time and energy into the project to bring The Truth to the masses. And then today, YouTube yanks down about 10 of his videos because Patty complained about them. And then YouTube yanks down 1 more because I made a copyright claim about the photographs of me that he was using. He has to be so pissed now! All those years of work and we get a giant chunk of it taken off the internet. And there’s still more to go – he’s still using plenty of my material in his videos that I can make legitimate complaints against. And it’s not that I even care that the videos exist, because I know that no sane person will ever believe them. Just the idea of upsetting Richard Cardo makes me giggle.

Also, I made a parody video of Richard Cardo last week, using video of him but dubbing over his voice to make him confess to the murder and say a bunch of other nonsense. He saw this and got really upset and wrote me a giant angry email about it. Then he submitted a copyright claim against the video for using his video without his permission and YouTube took my video down. I figured that would happen. So today I wrote him an email on YouTube and said something like, “How’s it feel to have YOUR videos removed from YouTube? Haha, I bet you’re really mad, aren’t you?” It’s fun having someone so deserving to be messed with.

Snip

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I’m watching The Manhattan Project, which I haven’t seen since the 80’s. It’s a fun movie. I remember reading the book in Jr. High. It’s free to watch on hulu.com here: http://www.hulu.com/watch/50942/the-manhattan-project

I ran 6 MPH for 30 minutes straight today. That’s my longest time at that pace. Usually I take a break at 20 minutes.

Payton was doing some report on beavers for school and I found out that they’re not allowed to call beaver dams dams. They call it a lodge instead. Because “dam” is a curse word. Isn’t that the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard? It’s like we’re moving backwards.

The Mysterious Stranger transcripts is awesome. Three separate versions of the same story, which happens to be my favorite book. And the first version, which is the one they used in the book, is an extra 50 pages. It’s like seeing the deleted scenes on a DVD.

Terminator

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One of my all-time favorite movies is Terminator 2. In 1991, I was working at Union Station Cine in St. Louis, Missouri when the movie came out. I had no idea what Terminator was and didn’t care. I wasn’t a fan of action movies and didn’t care much for Arnold. I caught bits of it while doing my ushering thing at the theater, but I didn’t really pay much attention to it.

Finally though, after it had been in the theater for a few weeks, I caught the ending chase scenes and was intrigued enough to start sneaking in as often as I could while working to catch parts of it. Eventually I saw the whole thing and I was hooked. Soon after that I rented the first Terminator movie and I liked it as well. Not as much as T2, but it was still a good movie. I ended up staying after work several times just to watch T2 in the theater again.

The reason I was working in downtown St. Louis (a 30 minute drive from my home in Illinois) was because I was hoping to move there. I was looking at apartments and other job opportunities in the area, saving money, and happily planning my new life in the big city. My parents didn’t even know I was working there for the first couple months. They thought I was going to work in Alton each day. I finally mentioned that I was when some guy from their church was surprised to see me working there and I figured it’d be best for my parents to find out from me instead of some random person at their church.

Earlier in the year, my girlfriend and I had been apartment hunting in Illinois. We’d also been talking about moving to Galveston, Texas. At some point during all of this she decided that I sucked and broke up with me, which is when I decided to move to St. Louis. The only reason I picked a city so close is that I knew my move would upset my parents and figured they could cope better if I were a mere 30 minutes away. But then I liked the scenes of Los Angeles so much in T2 that I suddenly decided I would just move there instead. And I was tired of waiting, so I put in my 2 weeks notice.

Over the next 2 weeks, I made my final preparations to move which included looking in Los Angeles newspapers for rent prices. They were insane and I knew if I drove there, not only would I blow a lot more of my saved money on gas, I would probably be homeless too. So I settled on Galveston, which I really wanted to see anyway since I’d been reading all about it earlier in the year. I left and I made it there. Thanks for the inspiration, T2!

A few years ago Terminator 3 came out. I was excited to hear about that, but then I heard they weren’t using the original John Connor, there was no Sarah Connor and James Cameron had nothing to do with it. By the time it was released, I was expecting to be disappointed and the movie didn’t let down my expectations. It had neat effects, action and a cool ending, but it just sucked overall.

Now they’re preparing to release Terminator 4, with ANOTHER new John Connor, no Arnold and no James Cameron. It seems weird to use Batman as John Connor, though I’m sure he’ll be better than that guy from Terminator 3. I actually have higher hopes for this one than 3. I know there’s a pretty good chance of just being disappointed again, but I think it could be good.

For the past year I’ve been really enjoying The Sarah Connor Chronicles on TV. It’s the only show on that I never miss. I actually watch it on TV and not hulu.com because I don’t want to wait the extra day to see it. I like all the characters in it and it’s a fun plot with them going around battling random terminators and hoping to stop Judgment Day. And they keep throwing all these random filler episodes in, like the girl Terminator losing her memory and thinking she’s a real girl with amnesia or the Terminator who’s accidentally sent to the 1920’s and becomes a real estate mongol. Silly, pointless stuff, but it’s great.

Each week, after the episode ends, I spend sometimes more than an hour reading the Sarah Connor Chronicles message board. That’s how much I like this show. Today while on the message board, I found a link to The Secret Diary of Cameron Baum. It’s hilarious stuff, especially the first couple chapters. It’s a humorous take on Cameron’s (the girl Terminator) day-to-day life. Read about her adventures in making a miniature reptar terminator for her science fair project, her failed attempts at being on top of the cheerleading pyramid, her night of big winnings in Vegas and her Terminating ants and dogs that wander onto their property. This is why I wrote this giant entry, because this diary story is cracking me up. One chapter to go…

Bolt

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Went to see Bolt this weekend with the kids. I didn’t realize that it was in 3-D. I also didn’t know that the theater was going to charge us NINE DOLLARS AND TWENTY-FIVE CENTS EACH to get into a matinee. That sucked. I guess with all the movies going 3-D, that’s going to be their excuse for charging us double the price. I love going to movies and I’ve managed not to complain about ticket prices too much, but this could seriously curb my movie-going addiction.

The 3-D didn’t really add anything to the film either. They didn’t do a whole lot with it. All the glasses do is darken the screen and make your face slightly more uncomfortable. Welcome to the future! On the upside, I actually was able to see the 3-D effects. My vision has always been screwy enough to make 3-D movies completely pointless for me, but I’m guessing that wearing glasses for the past year straight has done something for me, because the 3-D worked. This is a first for me. It still wasn’t worth the crazy ticket price, though.

Saturday we hiked and found a geocache. Sunday we did some local geocaching where we failed a lot. Then I took them to see the cool fence post cache. We also found a cache in the parking lot at the movie theater after our movie was over. We’ve decided to find every cache in Albany. We’re off to a bad start, though, with our 3 failures in a row on Saturday.

That image should indicate how many caches I’ve found. The number is low because I’ve always been lazy about logging my caches. I’m sure I’ve done over 100 now, between Illinois, Montana, Idaho, Texas and Oregon. I’m going to start logging all my finds though. If you’ve never heard of Geocaching, you should check it out at www.geocaching.com. Chances are, you walk or drive by several hidden caches every day. You don’t really even need a GPS to do it, just visit the website, put in your zip code, then zoom an ariel view map to the location you choose and print the map. Or cut/paste the coordinates into Google Maps for an even closer ariel view. You can even hide your own for other people to find.

Zoom this map to your current location and you’ll see how many caches are near you. There are over 100 in my city. It’s simple, fun, addictive, GO DO IT! And then post in the comments about how awesome I am for getting you started on a fun new hobby.

OMG Who Framed Roger Rabbit????

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Last week my son mentioned that he’d never seen Roger Rabbit so I ordered it from Netflix and we watched it tonight. Man, I’d forgotten what an unimaginative piece of crap that movie was. It tried way too hard. Disney pretending they’re Warner Bros. Sure, it was neat with all the live action combined with animation, but ugh. The scene in the theater where Roger Rabbit was going on about Goofy’s brilliant performance in the cartoon they were watching was sickening. “What brilliant comedic timing!” he yells. Disney cartoon shorts were the lamest, unfunniest shit ever. They all had stupid voices and tried to pass off the dumbest crap as comedy. Did people in the 1950’s actually think Mickey was awesome? I can’t believe Warner Bros. agreed to have their amazing characters alongside all that Disney crap. What a horrible blow for the 80’s.

I’ve done a lot of stuff lately, but I can’t seem to remember much of it. This evening the kids and I went on a hike with the hiking group, then had pizza at Woodstocks. There were about 7 of us total on the hike. At the top of the hike we were all just kind of hanging around and a guy was looking on his iPhone and mentioning that there was a Geocache up here. I said, “Oh really, let’s find it!” and he said that his dumb, useless iPhone doesn’t even have GPS so we couldn’t. Only he didn’t insult his iPhone like I did there. I said, “Well my Blackberry does because it’s about a billion times more awesome than your stupid phone that can’t even cut and paste text. Give me the coordinates.”

So he started reading the coordinates to me and I was typing them in. And before my GPS could even lock in, my kids emerged from a group of trees with a plastic container yelling, “We found it!” I guess it was hidden in a pretty obvious spot. They sure know how to take the fun out of a Geocache though!

Yesterday we saw City of Ember at the Pix theater. I don’t know how that theater stays in business. It was opening weekend for that movie and there were only 20 people in there. And that’s the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen there. I’ve spent the last week moving all my websites to a new server, which I think I finished today. I vacuumed a lot today and the kids cleaned their rooms. I know there was more. Dang memory. I’m going to bed.

Oh wait, I got a funny message on YouTube today. It’s from some girl named Ashley and she says, “I know you killed JonBenet Ramsey. Everything Richard said was right. I may be young at age 14, but I already have even more evidence pointing to you than Richard does. I know what I’m doing and you WILL pay for hurting this little girl and i will make sure of that if it’s the last thing I do.”

I replied with, “Shut up, bitch, or you’re next! Just kidding. I hope you’re more competent with your investigative skills than Richard is, though.” And I just now noticed her response. “trust me…I am a thousand times more competent…..is that a confession? did you really do this? please just tell me I won’t like turn you in or anything I’m 14. nobody would believe me anyway…and the Boulder police are complete dumbasses so even if i knew who killed jonbenet I wouldnt tell them because they’re retarted.”

I’m not sure what I’ll write back to her. If anyone’s forgotten, last February I found out some nutcase was claiming I was involved in the murder of Jonbenet Ramsey. Which I suppose I should point out isn’t true. I got an email from some other guy on YouTube last month asking if I was the guy they were talking about. I wrote back, “Yep, I’m the one he’s talking about. My friends and I have nothing to do with Jonbenet though. Richard Cardo is a nutcase.” I actually love Richard Cardo for making my life more interesting though.

Penny Arcade Expo 2008 Aftermath

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The kids and I drove to Idaho and spent a week there. We went to a theme park called Silverwood and Payton rode his first rollercoaster. Emily rode her first rollercoaster that went upsidedown. I rode my first rollercoasters since about 2000 or 2001. I need to do that more often, preferably during times of the year where lines to ride them aren’t as long. Payton said he’ll never ride another one, but I don’t believe him. I got a great picture of him and I looking terrified, but I haven’t scanned it into my photo album yet.

A few days later we went to see a movie. The Rocker. The night before, Mr. Spessa and I collected 20 – 30 moths from their porch light and spent a lot of time getting them all into 2 mason jars. We sat in the back row, right under the projection booth, and set them free. It wasn’t quite as chaotic as we’d hoped, but there were a steady stream of giant moths on the screen throughout the movie. They were blurry moths and I was hoping for crisp, clear, black moths on the screen. I guess the window is just too close to the projector. And the billion candlepower light in the projector shines right through the moths. I’m not saying it sucked, but it wasn’t as epic as I was hoping for.

About 1/4 of the way through the movie, the projectionist opened up the projection booth window and captured the moths that were just sitting on the window. So we got to see a giant hand on the screen for a few seconds, then the blurry moths disappeared. Some new moths appeared on the window later during the movie and moths occasionally flew around in front of the screen. Next time we hope to capture twice the number of moths. And also, capture them right before the movie instead of 24 hours before the movie, so they’re more active.

After a week in Idaho, we drove to Seattle to attend PAX 2008. It’s the first time we’ve ever attended it. The kids really enjoyed just hanging out in the wireless lounge and having hundreds of DS users to chat with and play games with. Had their pictures taken with lots of video game characters, many which we didn’t even recognize. Payton was playing the newest Destroy All Humans game for awhile and suddenly the alien from the game comes up behind him and taps him on the shoulder. That was great.

Payton with the Destroy All Humans alienKids and a Halo guy
Kids with the Beautiful Katamari princeMe and MC Frontalot

I met MC Frontalot and got my picture taken with him. That was awesome. Jonathan Coulton was there too but the line to talk to him was too long for me to want to stand in it. Wil Wheaton was at a booth too, and so was that red haired girl from Dr. Horrible and The Guild. We bought pointless t-shirts and picked up tons of free swag.

I brought PLA Flyers with me, hoping to leave them on a table somewhere for people to take. But I couldn’t find any tables, so I just started handing them out to people as I passed them, saying “Free cactus” to them. (It was the flyer with the free cactus coupon on it.) Then the kids started passing them out to people and Payton was handing them to vendors and characters. He even waited in line for 15 minutes, just to hand MC Frontalot a flyer. The next day we passed the Jonathan Coulton table and I noticed a stack of PLA flyers sitting in the center of the table, right next to his other giveaway stuff. I told Payton and he says, “I know, I gave them to him.” So I guess he left a bunch with him and they just left it on the table for the rest of the weekend.

After a day of going up to video game characters and asking if we can have pictures with them, I said to Payton, “Wouldn’t it be funny to just go up to a normal guy and act like he’s a celebrity and ask to have your picture taken with him?” Less than a minute later, Payton runs up to a random guy and tells him he’s a huge fan and it was great to meet him. I bet it was the most bizarre thing that happened to him that weekend. He was nice enough to let us take a picture:

Payton with some celebrity guy

We also visited Archie Mcphee’s again since the Spessas had never been there. Spessa ended up buying about 50 super balls for us to throw around the expo. We (Mr. Spessa and I) ended up taking them to a balcony on the 4th floor and dropping them all down into the lobby at once, as Spessa stayed below to watch. It was great. They were bouncing everywhere and hitting people. And then people started picking them up and continued to bounce them. We went to the lobby and started throwing them everywhere and surprisingly no convention center staff came over and told us to cut it out. No, we didn’t take pictures of the balls falling so you just have to use your imagination.

We left Seattle Sunday afternoon and arrived back in Albany around 9:30pm.

Roku Netflix box

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I’ve been a Netflix subscriber for most of this year now and it’s a great service. But what’s turned it into an awesome service is that box in the picture over there. That’s the Roku Netflix player and it rules so much. It lets me stream 10,000 or so TV and movie titles over the internet and onto my TV. Not new releases so much, but plenty of really great old stuff. All that’s required is that I keep my Netflix account. The quality of the movies is just as good as DVD and looks great on my 26″ LCD. I’ve heard that they’re going to start offering HD content soon, but I don’t even care. I’m happy with it the way it is.

This thing makes me even happier than I ditched 100% of my DVD collection last year. And I’m sure the service is going to just keep getting better, especially once Blockbuster releases their own TV box later this year and they have to keep up with the competition.

I’m surprised stuff like this isn’t bringing the cable TV rates down. I haven’t had anything more than the basic network cable for the past year, which I never watch. I only keep it because of the promotional thing I’m on with Comcast makes it cheaper to have cable with my phone and internet than to not have cable at all. Last week the promotional thing ran out, so I called them once again to cancel my cable TV and they set me up with another promotional thing so it’s cheaper to keep my cable. They desperately want me to have cable TV. Speaking of cable TV, look at these girls. I want to punch them both.

My Netflix queue is down to 15 movies now. It’s been consistently over 100 movies ever since I had it, as I’ve been copying just about everything that’s come in. But I’m almost finished with building my collection. After that I’ll be moving to the $8.99 plan on Netflix, which will make my Roku box even more awesome because it’ll be crazy-cheap. Wonder how many months until my personal digital movie collection is rendered completely useless because the Roku box will stream everything Netflix has.

Biking to the movies

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That’s a picture of Emily throwing her arms up to block a picture from being taken during a small break from riding bikes. We biked about 5 miles to the movie theater today, then back. Definitely their longest biking trip to date. We stopped at their moms, Fred Meyer, and Circle K for movie theater candy on the way. We saw, of course, Indiana Jones 4. Normally we stay at the theater for a 2nd movie, but nothing else really worth seeing was there.

Indiana Jones was good, albeit incredibly unbelievable. I know you’re supposed to suspend disbelief and just enjoy movies like this, but they were just asking us to accept way too much. Like, did you know that you can lock yourself inside a refrigerator and be launched hundreds of feet through the air (via a nuclear explosion) and walk out of the fridge perfectly fine? Or that you can drive your boat car off a 100′ cliff into the water and you don’t even fall out? Then the same boat can fall down 3 separate water falls and you’ll still be fine? They barely even fell out of the boat and just climbed right back in each time. Gotta love movie physics. Oh, and then there were at least 4 scenes with Indiana and his friends running away from heavily armed bad guys, all of them shooting but nobody ever gets hit. There’s just no way they all missed him.

The kids and I watched the first 2 Indiana Jones movies this week and last. I’ve actually never seen either of them all the way through. I’ve only caught bits of them on cable throughout the years and thought they looked kind of boring. I have seen #3 many times, though, since I worked at a theater when it came out.

So that’s my weekend so far.

Sprint sucks

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A few years back, I was using Sprint PCS as my wireless carrier. I decided that I needed more monthly minutes, so I called in to change my calling plan. I think at this point I’d been a Sprint subscriber for 4 or 5 years, so I was no longer under their 2 year contract. The person I spoke with said that to make any changes to my calling plan, they would have to renew my 2 year contract. Just to pay Sprint more money, I would have to renew the contract. I argued for a bit and even talked to a supervisor, but they refused to let me make any changes without renewing. I told them I would likely switch to another carrier before I would sign another 2 year contract with Sprint PCS.

So that’s what I ended up doing. I signed up with Verizon Wireless a few days later (yes, I had to sign up for 2 years of Verizon Wireless) and then I called Sprint PCS to cancel. The man at Sprint said he was sorry to see me go and asked what he could do to retain me as a customer. I told him that he could change my calling plan without locking me into another 2 years of service with them. He said he couldn’t do that, but ended up transferring me to some other department who are supposed to do whatever they can to keep their customers. At this point I had no intentions of staying with Sprint PCS since I already had my shiny new Verizon Wireless phone. I just wanted to see if they would change their minds.

And they didn’t. All I wanted to do was pay them more money per month and remain their customer like I’d been for several years. But they weren’t having that. So today when I read several times in all my blogs that Sprint has lost 1.09 million wireless subscribers and $505,000,000 so far this year, that made me happy. Neener neener, Sprint!

This weekend the kids and I (and a neighbor kid) went to see Speed Racer and Iron man. Both were great. I actually liked Speed Racer better than Iron Man. Which is weird since I really didn’t even care about seeing it. It was amazing, though. Really cool visuals and story. Too bad it bombed horribly at the box office.

I’m unhappy with my new web host. The sites keep slowing to a crawl and locking up. Their tech support claims that MySQL doesn’t work so great with virtual hosting. So I guess going with an actual dedicated hosting plan will clear things up, which I’ll do soon. It’s just annoying, though. Why even offer MySQL if it’s just going to lock everything up?

Today I listened to the first 3 episodes of the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show. I downloaded them all a couple years ago, intending to listen to them. But then I discovered podcasting, which has become an obsession of mine that leaves very little time to listen to non-feed based audio. But talking with John recently has reminded me that I have them, so now I’ll probably listen to all of them over the next few weeks. I’ve never heard any of them before.

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