Category Archives: Entertainment

Saw

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Do you remember how, last week, I was commenting that I wanted to see the movie Saw? Well, as luck would have it, it is still in theatres three months after release, making that possible. So I saw it today yesterday.

I am not capable of doing an objective review of anything, and I am certainly not going to try to learn how to be objective, or to review, for the purposes of bitching about this movie. I am also going to spoil every damn ‘twist’ in the movie that was supposed to make it more shocking and amazing. Bear that in mind if you read beyond this paragraph.

I was extremely underwhelmed by the movie. The teasers and previews made it out to be some sort of psychological thriller along the lines of Silence of the Lambs and Seven. While Silence of the Lambs is a pretty high bar to set for a movie, Seven seems a bit more realistic of a goal. Judging a movie is always a bit of a joke anyway, since it depends on the person who reviews it understanding the material, reading the clues (in this case) etc. It is a very subjective thing. The reason that I linked to the other movies through Rotten Tomatoes was to illustrate the point that hundreds of people can watch the same movie and give it glowing praise, albeit for different reasons. Silence of the Lambs stands at 97% positive on their scale, while Seven is only at 85%. Yet, comparing that to the dismal 47% that Saw is sitting at, you can see that the majority opinion really does work (if you have seen the movie I am sure you will agree).

For some reason, though, when people who are not professional critics review the movie they give it pretty high marks. I am going to attribute this to the fact that if you like it you want to rave about it, while if you hate it you just want to forget about it. Thus, people who liked it are far more likely to voice their opinions about it (in the form of a review/recommendation) than people who didn’t like it. It is either that or every major critic is just plain wrong. I have watched a lot of movies that got bashed by the critics, this particular one is a case where I pretty much agree with them. Which, I suppose, puts me into the middle of the critic camp. But, this movie is so deserving of being there…

Spoilers galore start here.

The movie starts with a guy in a bathtub, and drowning. He has no idea where he is, of course, else it would make for a pretty lame thriller. There are two other people in the room, one on the opposite side of the room, the other dead, in a pool of his own blood, with a revolver in one hand and a tape recorder in the other. This is where the movie grabs you and promises greatness. Greatness that is never achieved.

I think that this may be the reason why I really didn’t like the movie very much. The material is great, the killer has a very unique style that leaves open thousands of possibilites for where it can take the viewer. Unfortunately, the movie takes you straight down the freeway, as opposed to taking a side road with lots of twists and turns. Had this screenplay been turned over to someone like Wes Craven or Stephen King, I really think that it could have gone from pretty mundane to outright brilliant.

In any thriller there must be scenes that shock and surprise you. Saw has a couple of moments that shock you (for all the wrong reasons) and a couple of moments of surprise, but they generally just fell flat. There were not a lot of people in the theatre where I watched the film, but still, no one screamed even once, there didn’t seem to be any gasps of horror; I looked to my wife during a couple of the ‘shocking’ parts to find her with her mouth agape…unfortunately, she was yawning (no joke).

In one particular scene there is a flashback of one of the major characters, showing how he was abducted in the first place. He is walking through a tiny apartment, it is totally dark (the power has been cut off) so he is using his camera flash (he is a photographer) as a make-shift flashlight. Of course, he can only use the flash once every few seconds, leaving many, many opportunities for surprise. Instead, he eventually reaches a room where he hears a noise in the closet. He lets his flash charge, then reaches for the knob, opens the door and flashes. The guy was there…Not very startling…Honestly now, with only a camera flash as a light source, being able to use it only once every few seconds, you really should be able to make a little bit more shocking scene than that. In the dark of the house, his vision would be momentarily stunned by the light as well, leaving hundreds of opportunities to actually surprise him/us.

The entire movie is much the same. The times when you should have your heart racing, wondering what is going to happen, where the killer might be, etc. The killer is always in the most obvious place, the only place you would expect him to be. It is very anticlimatic in that respect. Never is there a scene where you are just watching and all of a sudden something makes you gasp or scream. If this is supposed to be a ‘thriller’ or ‘horror’ film, wouldn’t you expect that to happen multiple times? I sure did, but that is why I am ranting about it.

One major plus for the movie is that I did not know who did it until they told me. Most movies of this type (and I can think of only Urban Legend as I sit here) end with me knowing who did it for a good half of the film. I strongly doubt that there is anyone, anywhere, that was actually able to finger the culprit in this one before the final frame of the movie. I am not saying that just because I am mad at myself for not guessing it either, I am saying that because it is/was literally impossible for the perpetrator to be who it ended up being.

A very short time into the movie, they introduce a character who you just know is the guy who did it. He is an intern at a hospital where one of the victims (a doctor) work. The fact that it all points so obviously to him simply excludes him. Later in the movie it actually shows that character (if the movie held my interest, I might remember the names) holding the doctor’s family hostage. This all happens by halfway through it, thus we know that he can not possibly be the guy behind it all.

Then the movie tries to make you think that it was one of the police investigating the crimes that is behind it…It does this even after it has shown that investigator getting knifed by the villain. While that would have been an interesting way for it to go, it is impossible for any person to have two bodies at the same time (well, maybe in porn). One can not be kneeling on the floor in front of one’s self, then turn around and slash one’s (the other one) neck and run away.

So, you must wonder, who really did it. Well the answer is pretty obvious, isn’t it? It was, of course, the dead body that has been laying on the floor in the room with the two victims for the last eight hours. I must admit that this was foreshadowed a bit by showing one of his crimes using a powerful tranquilizer to make someone appear dead, but then I would also have to mention that he somehow actively ‘electrocuted’ both of the guys while he was in that state.

The way that you know that the intern from the hospital had nothing to do with it is because of the electrical shocks (or common sense). If he had the power to kill them from the little room he was sitting in, he would never have gone down to actually shoot them when the time ran out. Not to mention that one of the shocks happened while he was on his way to the area where the victims were confined. Of course, that is where the story all turns into Swiss Cheese with holes, and likely the reason that it ended pretty abruptly right there.

You see, the killer was an older guy in the hospital with some cancer in the frontal lobe of his brain. He seemed to be comatose, yet, his first crime happened at that time, which is why the doctor was a suspect. I am pretty sure that you can fake being asleep, but can you fake having cancer in your brain, being in a coma, having doctors diagnose it, then go ahead and run out to build a huge cage of razor wire while you are at it? If you can then you are a better man than me. Possibly so much a better man that you managed to steal the doctors little flashlight, so that you could leave it at the scene of the crime. All that seems pretty tough to do while you are in a hospital bed. Of course I may just be thinking a tad too realistically.

The real question is: If the mastermind of the plot was really the ‘dead body’ where the main plot happens, and if he was using a tranquilizer to make him appear dead, how did he manage to 1)suppress bodily functions for that amount of time? 2)Shock both of the victims at random, while both of his hands were clearly visible? 3)Get both of the guys into that room before taking the tranquilizer (as one mentioned that he had tried screaming, to no effect. And the other woke up drowning in a bathtub. Making me think that the first guy had been there for a while before the second guy got there). 4)All of this is not even touching on how the guy that was in a coma, in the hospital, was able to get out to conduct the first couple of crimes, let alone set up a little media center in an abondoned building. Which leads nicely into 5)How can you possibly get the electric company to supply power to an abandoned building in the first place? -I had to show two forms of ID and have a home inspection before they turned on the power at my house-.

Now just a couple of technical fubars. The cell phone that the doctor finds appears to be exactly the same phone that he had when he was abducted. He is a doctor, lots of people are likely trying to call him, what if someone other than the killer calls? Towards the end of the movie, the doctor is not able to reach his cell phone, it is just out of his reach. He tries using a small box to retrieve it, can’t reach. Then he grabs a hacksaw (average length about 16″), which has a handy loop at the end of it, and proceeds to chop off his own foot, hmm, perhaps the hacksaw could have reached the phone?

I really thought that I was going to like this movie. I likely would have liked this movie if it had lived up to its potential. My wife told me that the story was written by some ‘no-name’ and was later picked up by an actual production company, that is great and all, but someone along the line should have said; “you know, it is decent as is. We could get a real producer in here and make it great.” Which, obviously, never happened. My guess is that this one will get remade in a decade or so, and it will be absolutely brilliant.

This movie is absolute proof that a good idea/story does not necessarily lead to a good movie.

Wow, I didn’t realize just how badly I hated this movie. Die, Saw, Die!

Thanksgiving thoughts and National Treasure

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To begin by finishing where I left off on Thursday, the remainder of the Thanksgiving went rather well. It was unfortunate that my Mother-in-law was not able to sit at the table for the meal (due to extreme pain in her hip, something I certainly can’t/won’t fault her for), but the food and the company were both good. I might add that this is the first time that one of the guest actually did the dishes before leaving, which was nice (especially for the wife, who had been busting her ass for the last couple of days to get everything ready for the feast). Of course when I think about it, no one except my wife ever seems to have to put so much time into the preparation of the meal, which includes washing most of the pans a couple of times along the way to use them to make additional dishes. Perhaps in the future we should require additional help in the final clean up. Now that is something that we could truly be thankfull for.

• Having nothing of any substance planned for this Sunday, I decided that it would be nice to go and see a movie. There were three movies playing that I had an interest in seeing, those being “Saw”, “National Treasure” and “The Incredibles”. Our theatre of choice (which is only our theatre of choice because it is always slow, especially on Sundays.) was not showing “Saw” at all, and the nearest other theatres were only showing it much later in the day. Left with the choice between “The Incredibles” and “National Treasure”, I went to check the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. “The Incredibles” has an amazing 96% positive rating over there, while “National Treasure” is being beaten to death. I was thinking that we would go see the former, however, when I presented the options to the wife, she chose the latter. You guess which one we went to see.

How was the movie? It was pretty good.

A lot of the critics are ripping at National Treasure for being basically Indiana Jones meets The Davinci Code. That might all be true, since I have yet to read the Davinci code there is no way for me to know. Of course critics have only opinions, and opinions are not to be taken as fact. When almost every major critic is saying the same thing, however, it seems to push it from an opinion to a more-than-likely that the plot is ripped off from the aforementioned book. The fact that I didn’t read the Davinci Code might have made it possible for me to enjoy the movie, as such, I just hung on for the ride.

I am not sure whether the fact that I don’t watch a lot of movies made me enjoy it more than a seasoned movie-goer, but I must say that it kept me entertained from start to finish. There were a couple of pretty dull moments in it, as well as a couple of times where completely abstract clues were solved just a smidge to fast (putting it mildly). But in my rating system I judge only by how many times I check my watch. I checked my watch about a half a dozen times during this one, however the watch checks were not based on boredom, but on curiosity as to how much time had passed since I last checked. The first time I looked down was over an hour into it (counting the previews), so I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t having some weird episode with ‘missing time’ or something. The rest of the times that I was checking the watch were much later in the film, and then just because I really, really, wanted to see exactly what the treasure was, and wondered how much longer they could hold out on letting me see it.

Being a veteran of a lot of video games, I was not surprised to see references to the Knights Templar in the film. There have been rumors of the wealth of the Templars forever, tons of books have used that as a premise, as well as a lot of point-and-click adventure games. It is good solid mythology to base them on. Not quite as popular in the U.S. as it is abroad, I think the movie will do extremely well overseas, where they really eat these stories up.

The tie-in of the Masons was certainly meant to draw in the conspiracy theorists here in the U.S. The Masons are a society that is pretty well known, yet not many people over here know exactly what they stand for. While it is certainly true that some of the forefathers, George Washington for instance, were Masons, it is pretty likely that a lot of people who opposed the U.S. having independence were Masons as well.

Trying to combine the Legend of the Templars from centuries long ago with the Masons of today (or 200 years ago) just doesn’t fit. The Masons have set up a helpfull little page on their website for those who watched the movie and thought that every minute of it was true.

Just to venture a guess, I am gonna say that anyone who knows anything about early American history is going to have a lot of problems with this film. I don’t know much about it at all, but I still know enough to doubt the Templar/Mason aspect of it. There is also the fact that some of the clues are on printed money. While the bills have remained (virtually) the same for quite some time, there were not paper bills going back as far as necessary to make that premise work for this film (this was, I think, a way for them to avoid having to find the actual paintings that the bills were based on, which would have made the movie go a lot longer.).

Further, anyone who knows anything about modern science will point out that the shadow that is cast from the tower at independence hall will vary not only by the time of day, but also by the day of the year. My wife pointed out (and I noticed) that the place the shadow was pointing to was pretty clearly marked when viewed close up anyway, the problem with that is that the film made you believe that it could only be seen at exactly 2:22p.m. (and why p.m.? The moon will make things cast shadows on clear nights). That is not even bringing to light the fact that if 200 years had really passed since the original clue was left the shadow wouldn’t fall the same anyway. A couple of hundred years can make shadows fall a bit different, if you know what I mean.

Finally, at least as far as ripping the movie apart, the opening sequence is all too easy. Why would an old, wooden ship be anywhere near the Arctic Circle in the first place (I understand it is a bit chilly up there). Even if it was, why would it be common knowledge to everyone who signed the declaration of independence? How did the Hero in this story find information to lead him to the ship when all his ancestors had failed? (that part is not touched on at all. No mention of why he was looking there as opposed to looking at the South Pole.) Yes, ocean currents could dictate the direction of the ship, but when the ship is lost it is usually because of catastrophic disaster, not sailing into a little nook that then freezes over trapping you. Even if that did happen, why did the people die in the ship? It is then solid ground (well ice, but ice that huge motor vehicles can traverse), why not try to find a way out? Ohh, right, had they done that, they might have lived. Had that happened, I would not have had a movie to watch in the first place.

Wow, that sounds pretty brutal, and I actually liked the movie.

The movie flows pretty well. There are some times when there are far too many cut-scenes, which I suppose add to the drama, but kind of fall flat in the greater scheme. The movie is pretty long (which was a good thing in this case), which kept me wondering how much the good guys would be able to find before the bad guys got the upper hand again. The ‘riddles’ are all a bit too unbelievable, especially in the solving portion of them. Yet, it was entertaining from beginning to end. That seems to be a difficult thing for a film to achieve.

I really enjoyed the film, even when it tried to tie the Templars to the Masons. It kept my curiosity high enough that I wanted to see the final frame, just to see how it would all turn out. There was never a doubt as to whether the good guys would win, yet, the bad guys were close enough to get the upper hand quite a few times. There are a couple of unexpected twists (unless you have read the Davinci Code, evidently), that don’t really throw you off, but at least make yoy question your theory about how it will all work out.

Long story shorter, I watched this film for more than two hours and I think I got my money’s worth. You might want to make sure that you get it at matinee pricing though. Not great, but a good ride for sure.

Ebert actively hated it. A quote from the final paragraph in his review:

Cage, one of my favorite actors, is ideal for this caper because he has the ability to seem uncontrollably enthusiastic about almost anything. Harvey Keitel, who plays FBI agent Sadusky, falls back on his ability to seem grim about almost anything. Jon Voight calls on his skill at seeming sincere at the drop of a pin. Diane Kruger has a foreign accent even though she is the National Archivist, so that our eyes can mist at the thought that in the land of opportunity, even a person with a foreign accent can become the National Archivist. “National Treasure” is so silly that the Monty Python version could use the same screenplay, line for line.

What, did this film kill his mom?

Turkey day and Rollercoaster Tycoom

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Turkey Day!


Technically, I think it is only turkey day in the U.S., but since I am relatively sure that my readership has yet to venture beyond the state that I live in, let alone to other continents, I am pretty sure that all eyes upon this page celebrate thanksgiving (or at the very least acknowledge it).

This year, the wife spent hours and hours over the last couple of days trying to get everything ready, and did a marvelous job of it. Unfortunately, being that it is a holiday, things must go awry. Nothing terrible this year; the turkey is done, as are the rolls and other such fare, we are simply waiting on the potatoes. The unfortunate part of this is that the potatoes are my responsibility, at least in theory.

We were up at about 8 this morning to start with the turkey, you know stuffing it and getting it into the oven. That task was completed by about 8:40, and with about five hours until it would be cooked. That was a pretty ideal time, I thought. Have the turkey ready by about 2 so that you can start to use the oven to make the sides (sweet potatoes and the such), and such it was. Even as I type this I can smell the pleasant aroma of the turkey that shall soon be on the plate in front of me. The rolls are golden, fluffy and beautiful. We are waiting on my mashed potatoes to begin the meal. Unfortunately the potatoes have not yet arrived at the house. Makes it a bit tough to cook them.

The potatoes appeared just after I finished the last sentence and have since been peeled and set to boil. The Thanksgiving feast should be here within about thirty minutes. That makes us just about an hour and a half from our goal of eating by 4, but what are you gonna do?

• On to discussing horribly outdated video games!

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that it seemed that roller coasters was not really the meat of how to win the scenarios in roller coaster tycoon. Today I tested that theory, albeit on only the second scenario. I was able to meet the goal (barely) with only roller coasters (and some bathrooms, food, etc. No other rides though). Unfortunately, I still have not found a way to build one of my own that people actually want to go on. If I use their pre-fabricated designs, there are people lining up to ride them. If I build them myself, even when I am trying to make them tame, I get intensity and nausea ratings that are ‘very extreme’, while the excitement of the ride remains unusually low. I am still working to remedy that problem.

There is yet another annoying aspect of the game (which would have been solved had it come with the instruction booklet) regarding the trash in the park. I did not know that you could build trash cans. Who would think that you would list trash cans under the ‘Scenery’ option? As a result of that little oversight I was forced to have at least double the amount of mainenance guys that I needed. Once again, it was a lesson learned, and a lesson that anyone who plays the game probably learned a half a decade ago. At any rate, I did discover that a bunch of trash cans can easily replace a bunch of idiots that just walk around looking for trash to pick up. It turns out that some of the people will put trash into a bin if it is available. Of course there are others that will throw it on the ground three steps from the can, but this is America…What do you expect?

I mentioned, in a previous post, that I bought this game based on my enjoyment of the game ‘SimCity’. One of the things that always annoyed me about SimCity was that you could not control whether the buildings that you built would turn into condos’ or the projects. Well, you could, but that would require moving power stations, adding parks, putting police and fire services closer, etc., etc. That is not one of the issues in the roller coaster game. All you have to do here is build big rides, put in the shops, sweep the vomit off of the sidewalks, and build a few trash cans to be successful. That is my kind of game. More of the building of enormous rides, less of the worrying about where the local fire department is. Of course I did have 16 deaths in an accident that I could have avoided (changed the configuration on the cars on a self-built coaster), but that was just a drop in the pan…Knocked the price down on the ride for a week or two and it was back to normal.

Simulations are nice when they don’t simulate real life, only the way that life should be.

• It seems that my potatoes are almost ready for smashing….almost…At any rate, enough for today.

Games and Religion (come to think of it, just games)

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Yesterday’s missed post can be blamed directly on Roller Coaster Tycoon. I took the liberty of breaking the EULA so that I could install it on both of the pc’s here in the house, since I recently gifted my wife the Age of Mythology game (since she seemed to love the Age of Empires game so much). After that point, I was playing the roller coaster game and not typing much at all. It seems I have grown accustomed to the split keyboard, while I can still type on a normal keyboard, the typos would be horrendous. Well, that and I really wanted to keep playing the game anyway. Pick any of those excuses and take it to heart, ’cause that was the real reason… Now, on to bigger and better things.

• Interesting article in the news, or not. I do suppose that it would depend a lot on your personal religious beliefs. No need to link to it here, since the story itself only seeded a thought in my mind and has nothing to do with the story that I happened to see the quote in. While I don’t remember the quote verbatim, it went something like this:

“I don’t know what the truth is. The only way we will find the truth is to put all of the parties on the stand, under oath, then we will know the truth.”

That is a very good argument. Unless you happen to be talking to someone who is not religious. You see, I am not religious, and as such, I would lie with my hand on a copy of the ‘Holy Bible’ without a second thought. Is there really someone, anyone, out there that is so naive that they think that a person who would openly break ‘God’s Commandments’, would admit to it if they had their hand on a bible? Like you kill 39 women, then deny all of the crimes, but the second you put your hand on the bible you start saying you killed them all? Yes, interrogate him under oath…No one lies, ever…

Lest you all start thinking that I don’t believe in god, I offer you this tidbit. I don’t believe in god, it is a sham that organized religion created to get you to give them money. Yet, when I do commit the mortal sins, I ask for forgiveness to cover my tracks. That is religion in action! Instant gratification for hell-bound practices…Damn, I may be Republican after all…

• Thanksgiving is tomorrow, in the U.S., and everyone is celebrating it. My number one question is why the ‘native americans’ are celebrating it. Was this the last holiday they had before the white man started killing their warriors, raping their women, and forcing them into the reservations that they eventually made it into? Is the ‘white man’ remembered fondly for his ability to trade vodka for gold?

• My mind is in a bit of a flurry right now, please excuse me for ending this shorter than expected.

Commercial law, Games, and Bad Santa

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I decided to take a week off of updating this page, and for no damn reason whatsoever. This should lead to one of two responses; either you are angry that I didn’t mention I would be taking the time off, or you didn’t even notice. Most likely the latter I suspect.

Fear not, nothing terrible has happened to myself or my family. I don’t have intentions of shutting down the page. I just didn’t feel like typing much over the last week. Not to mention that I didn’t find much of use in the news. I instead spent my computer time like I always did before I started this site, I played a lot of video games. And not even very good ones!

• Here is one of those things that I could not believe when I saw it, but when I clicked through to read the article I found out that it is true. Congress is sitting on legislation that would make it illegal to fast-forward through commercials on shows that you have recorded. How true that is, or how likely the legislation is to pass, remains a mystery.

While reading through the article linked to above, and having read a couple of other articles about the issue, it seems like what they are actually trying to get rid off is peer to peer file sharing software. How that has anything to do with fast forwarding through a commercial is beyond me. The thing is that this is just exactly how a lot of really stupid laws get passed. It starts with a fairly decent idea like banning peer to peer movie sharing software. Then someone in the advertising lobby says, “And while we are at it let’s make it illegal to fast forward through the commercials if they record the movie from tv.” Everyone laughs, but no one reads the fine print. Next thing you know you are in prison for skipping a kotex commercial.

Democracy in action. How sad is that.

• So I finally got around to buying Roller Coaster Tycoon. That is something that I had been thinking aobut doing since it came out, at which point I was pretty seriously into SimCity. So five or six years later, I actually boosted the nine bucks for the game. The first thing I gotta say is what a difference half a decade can make in system requirements. I have every one of the major requirements beat by 500%. Even the so-called ‘optimal’ ones. So, at the very least I don’t have to screw around with the choppy gameplay I would have had I bought it when it first came out.

As for the game itself, it is pretty fun. It is certainly not the type of game that you want to sit there and play. You really just want to get the park set up fairly well and then let it run in the background while you are off surfing porn sites and what not. Check back in once in a while to build new attractions as funds become available. That’s about it. Much like any simulation type game, you really have to have a taste for it in the first place. The type of micro management that you have to do is all a bit tedious, sometimes borderline boring. But it is fun to be able to quadruple the price of umbrellas when the weather forecast shows rain. It is good to be the king.

There are two things about the game that really annoy me. The first is that it is called Roller Coaster Tycoon, while it seems (at least early on) that roller coasters are far from the meat of succeeding in your objectives. They have some prefabricated coasters that you can put up, which cost a ton of money, that can attract a crowd. That is great for just getting started, but I want to build some really monsterous ones. Which I did. And while it costs me about 350 dollars an hour to operate it, it routinely goes through the course empty, almost all of the park goers say that it is too intense for them. Honestly now, most good theme parks are built around one very intense roller coaster. Some people will travel thousands of miles just to try out the next big one. Why is it that no one wants to ride the monster that I built? Oh well, it was a lesson learned.

The other annoying thing about it is that there are four different angles that you can view the park from. Depending on which view you have it on it will make it look like your coaster is a complete circuit, while if you rotate the view it turns out that you are off on the height or distance of a couple of sections of the track. This really only happens after you build one freestyle only to find out that one of the hills is too steep to make it up, thus forcing you to cut the section, tone it down, and try to reconnect later. I spent a good half an hour fucking with that problem yesterday, quite annoying. It is possible that this was all covered in the instruction booklet, however the game didn’t actually come with one, only a blurry version of it in .pdf format, which is quite the annoyance in and of itself.

These problems were likely solved in the second roller coaster tycoon game, who knows maybe I will buy that one in another five or six years.

• My wife and I took the time to watch the movie Bad Santa over the weekend. I found it pretty amusing. It was sort of the type of low brow humor I was expecting, while it did have moments that were damn near touching. The funniest part of the movie though was when Billie Bob Thorntons character said that the north pole was like the suburbs. When asked which one, he replied “Apache Junction”. You would really have to live in the Phoenix area to understand just how funny that is. A.J. is the butt of every joke ever made about rednecks, hispanics and indians. Of course it is deservedly so, there is nowhere else in the valley that has so few teeth, and so many non-functioning cars, per capita.

As far as Billie Bob, I don’t know that I had ever seen a movie with him in it. At least if I did he left so little impression on me that I am blanking it. I only knew who he was because of his previous relationship with Angelina Jolie. I can say this much for Billy Bob, he sure does play a convincing drunk. Whether that is the skill of a finely hones actor, or the easiest role of his life since it was not an act at all…Who knows?

Funny thing about my wife renting the movie was that the other movie she wanted to rent was not available that day. The other movie was ‘Elf’. I am just guessing here, but those two movies seem to be on opposite sides of the holiday film universe. Of course it could be that watching Elf after Bad Santa would negate some of the horrible Christmas thoughts that I now have in my head, but I guess I will never know.

I am pretty sure that the only reason that she was looking to rent Elf was that it has Will Ferrell in it. I like Will Ferrell as much as the next guy, but I am afraid that he is going down the same road that Jim Carey did early in his career. They put them in movies to get butts in the seats, then just make them basically do the same comedy routine that we have already seen hundreds of times. Then it just starts to get tired and boring. Hopefully this won’t be the case with Ferrell, or if it is he will overcome it as well as Carey did. Of course I don’t really care, so this is kind of moot anyway.

Well that is about it for today.

Mad Cow inaction, Survivor, CD’s

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The day/days since the last survivor have gone horribly bad. The best player got voted out tonight (which is likely open to discussion on a ton of sites.) I will say, instead, that ‘my guy’ got voted right out of there. Strongest player in the game, to be sure, most loyal guy, absolutely, just the next guy in the pecking order of the women. The absolution of what began all of those days ago.

I normally follow one or more of them through the whole endeavor, yet, when they voted out ‘Sarge’ tonight, I lost a lot of interest. Voting out the stronger players is just self-preservation, voting out the only guy who has helped/can help your game is just plain silly.

• This story, with a rather innocuous headline, Trade to Dominate Bush’s Farm Agenda , has me somewhere between angry and dumbfounded. The story is about the import/export of agricultural products, embargoes and other such dribble. One of the key things contained within it, though, is Mad Cow Disease.

I am not sure why this problem didn’t surface at all during the presidential elections, it certainly should have. I, as you likely know, am a butcher, and probably a bit more sensitive to the beef market than most people. I think it is pretty much common knowledge that there are over 20 countries that have banned the import of U.S. beef. It should be common knowledge that not only has the USDA not done anything to try to remedy the problem, but has in fact ordered at least one company to stop testing their own cattle for the disease. How this can possibly get us back into the international beef industry really escapes me. The only two possible reasons that I can see for this action is that either the USDA is afraid that really poor health standards over the last couple of decades have left a lot of the U.S. cattle with the disease, and they don’t want to make matters worse. The other option is that the USDA simply doesn’t give a fuck.

Now a fact that I didn’t know prior to reading the article is that the US imported more agricultural products last year than they exported. Not only that, the projected reports for 2004 are going to show that the defecit of export to import is likely to be in the billions. Knowing that fact, I am inclined to believe that the USDA is terrified to actually test the current cattle supply in the U.S.; knowing that sloppy standards have likely resulted in far more contamination than they let on to. The only reason that I assume that is that there is simply no way any agency would voluntarily let their product be banned, unless they had reason to believe that the truth is far worse than speculated.

Following on that same logic, and with the popularity of the Atkins Diet, I really believe that the standards of raising cattle in the U.S. have been altered enough to get rid of the disease in new cattle. However, the possibly infected supply of cattle must be exhausted before they dare to start testing them properly. In this scenario, this means that the USDA is knowingly feeding infected beef to the American people. In another couple of years they will start to test the cattle properly. Anyone who happens to die along the way will likely be swept under the rug so as not to cause another rush of fear in other countries. I know it sounds like a really bad conspiracy theory, but what other reason would there be for not allowing companies to test their own cattle, with their own money?

• Now for a random musing about the cost of cd’s.

This is a subject that I have been into a bunch of times before. While I am not going to try to find the pages where I went into it, I will just give you the basic idea of my previous arguments in a quick sentence or two. In 2002, I was able to buy 100 blank cd’s, jewel cases, labels and a program to print out the inserts for each cd. Net cost for each cd? Just under fifty cents, not counting the ink, which might have bumped it up to fifty-two cents. Now if that is how much I can do it for by myself, only buying 100 of everything, how much could it cost a company that buys their supplies by the millions? The second point was that you can buy a video game for the pc that has 5 discs in it, all with artwork on them, for about ten bucks once they are a couple of years old, note that the ten dollar price also has to pay the people who create/program the game, cover artists, etc. Also, it costs just as much to buy the latest music cd as it does to buy the latest hollywood blockbuster on dvd.

Today I found something, for the millionth time, that finally slapped me in the face about this whole issue. When is the last time that you were going through your mail to find that an old ‘LP’ fell out of it? How about an ‘8-track’? What about a ‘cassette tape’? That never happened, did it? The cd, however, is everywhere. It was falling out of one of the little pamphlets that I got in the mail today, there was a huge stand of them in the corner of the post office, even though the post office was closed, they were not stolen/missing/vandalized, no just sitting there. Of course these are all AOL cd’s so I guess it would be a bit tough to do anything with them, unless, of course, you were thirteen and really liked to watch what happens when you put one into the microwave (which is not all that spectacular, don’t try it). Is it really cheaper to send out cd’s (for AOL) than to pay for newspaper advertising, or just more effective?

The answers are all lost somewhere in time…Or at least in AOL Time/Warner…

Diablo and Republicans (you never see them in the same place at the same time)

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After my last post, Diablo happened. I got stuck, once again, in that neverending cycle of ‘just one more waypoint’, but then I have the area cleared so might as well do whatever act related quest is necessary, etc. That consumed most of my day on Monday. Tuesday brought about election day, and with that I found myself watching the news all night just waiting for them to say that they had grossly miscalculated the votes and that Bush was actually way behind in voting. Of course several hours of that didn’t yield any results, nor did it result in my typing anything here for you to read. Wednesday was just a late day at work, as that was the day of our bi-weekly grocery delivery. That leaves me here on Thursday wondering how it is that I have not updated this page since Sunday. Time sucks.

A question that I asked my wife last night, that I am really curious to know the answer to, is “What point is there in having a democracy if the majority of the people vote for the wrong person?” I know that the question is based on some pretty faulty logic, but in reality I think that it is a lot more true than it appears. This year’s elections have made it so that all three branches of government are being ruled by Republicans. Not just any Republicans in many cases, but the evangelical, second-coming-of-Christ type Republicans. I am sure that I am being a bit cynical here, but, isn’t that sort of like having a dictatorship? Well, I guess it does differ from a dictatorship in the fact that 51% of the people voted for it. Why this happened truly escapes me, makes me sick to my stomach, and further pisses me off since I have been paying money into Social Security since I was 16. While I have only been paying it for fourteen years, I will still be pissed when Dubya gets something through congress to do away with it completely. I also know that they (Republicans) are not actually trying to do away with Social Security, only change the way it is managed (like a forced retirement plan for people who don’t ever save money).

Here it is in all its pixelated glory. My breakdown of why I really, really, really hate the Republican agenda. Really rich people pay more taxes than poor people, which makes sense if you do it all by percentages. Really poor people pay no taxes, then get government assistance programs to send a bit more money to them, since they are so poor that they can’t afford a house, car, food and other necessities. The very wealthy people feel that they are being taxed too much for the sake of supporting the poor. The poor think that they aren’t getting enough assistance since life didn’t give them a fair roll of the dice. The solution, in the Republican’s eyes, is to decrease taxes on the very rich, and decrease government assistance programs to the very poor. That is where the problems all start. The rich (current administration included) don’t want to give any money to the poor, don’t want to take back tax cuts made for the very rich, and don’t care to hear any proposal whereby the poor can make it up to, at least, poverty level. So taxes must be raised, but on whom? Well, the middle class of course. So it pushes on, the poor staying poor, the middle class getting closer and closer to poverty, while the upper class roll around in their collective piles of money.

This might have made me sound like a freak, might even have worked itself into a full blown Manifesto, were it not for the fact that the day Dubya cut taxes on the wealthy last year, my state and federal taxes went up. I am all for a smaller government, I mean, hell, if we were to take away the wages of all of the Senators and House Representitives we might be able to work things out. How many millions of dollars did each candidate spend on the campaign trail this year? Imagine if that money was just sent to underfunded projects across the country, we might have been able to do some good.

With luck, I might be back to normal form tomorrow (be it good or bad). That is all for today.

][V][ EGADETH ][-][

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The thing that really irritates me about Saturday is the fact that my employers never listen to me. Megadeth was going to be playing a concert last night, you see, and I really wanted to be in attendance. So much so, in fact, that the tickets for said event were acquired within fifteen minutes of them going on sale to the public (which was on October 2nd). Now, knowing that I always have to work on Saturday nights, I made sure to let the boss know that I was going to be needing to get off early on that day. I told them about this on October 4th, also marked it on the calendar to make sure that they wouldn’t forget. Even if I round the numbers in their favor, they still had over three weeks to plan for me to not be at work for the last three hours on a Saturday. Yet, somehow, it was as if I had never mentioned it at all.

It isn’t like I frequently request days off at work, nor even specific hours off. The only days that I can remember having requested off were my brother’s wedding and my own wedding. I have requested to be off a bit early a couple of times, due to other events that I wanted to go to, without a problem, yet this one really seemed to piss them off. When I called work in the morning, inquiring as to whether they wanted me to work additional hours in the A.M. to make up for missed hours in the P.M., it was like they truly believed that I had never mentioned it, nor written it on the calendar. What do I need to do, drag them to a notary to sign a document stating that I am requesting three hours off in a month26 days? Hmm. Perhaps I should suggest that the next time I make plans and let them know well in advance, there would be no denying it then.

Enough about that, on to MEGADETH!

If I were to use a single word to describe the show, that word would be “Awesome”. I don’t mean that in the slang form of the word that the stoners picked up in the late eighties, I mean it in the literal sense. When I stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon, the view was awesome; When I saw Dave Mustaine play last night, having come back after a debilitating nerve injury to his left arm and hand, I was in awe. -Much on a side note, I saw a few speculations on the internet that his injury was not as bad as he made it sound, but if you had been following the Megadeth.com website, it shows the strange device that he had to put his arm/hand into, and he details some of the progress during the ordeal. I really doubt it was meant as a publicity stunt, especially since he is the only remaining member of the original band.- Anyway, back to random musings.

The band that opened for them was Exodus. For the majority of the world the only claim that Exodus has to fame is being the launchpad for Kirk Hammett of Metallica fame. Of course, if you are old enough, you might remember the one song that Exodus put out in the late eighties that got a lot of airplay, come on you remember the Toxic Waltz don’t you? -Or maybe, as my wife says, only I do.-

That last paragraph would have been deleted and only revisited in some later edition of Trivial Pursuit had I not found a really strong sense of irony in it. You see, Dave Mustaine was the original lead guitarist of Metallica. He was fired from the band just as they got signed and was replaced by Kirk Hammett, who was currently in the band Exodus. Now Exodus is opening for Megadeth on their tour for The System Has Failed. The only way that this could have gone more full circle is if Mustaine joined Exodus, then Metallica opened for them.

On to the show!

I was simply amazed by how much old-school stuff they did. They opened with the song “No Survivors”, which only myself and about eight other people in the crowd seemed to recognize. They played most of the songs that are still in cirulation on the radio, “Symphony of Destruction”, “A Tout Le Monde”, “Train of Consequences”, “Sweating Bullets”, come on, you know the regulars. Aside from starting the show with “No Survirors”, I was really blown away when they started to do “In My Darkest Hour”, I really didn’t think they were gonna play that one. Both “Hangar 18” and “Eye of the Tornado” also hit me a bit by surprise. Amazing songs all, and well appreciated, but it really seemed like I was the only one in my little section that knew the songs. Yet the same could be said for “Die Dead Enough”, “Kick the Chair”, “Back in the Day” and “Something That I’m Not”, which were all from the latest album, yet no one seemed to recognize them.

Megadeth (or what remains of it) certainly hit it on the head with both this album and this tour. There is no way that you can watch this show and imagine that anything has been sold out, except possibly the venue in the next town.

I may be the only one left in the entire world that wants to hear loud, heavy, ear-splitting music for the sake of entertainment, but I tell you Megadeth delivers that. As far as the (obligatory) encores, you know what they were… come on, think about it. That’s right! They were, first, “Peace Sells…But who’s Buying”, and second, after about five minutes, “Holy Wars…The Punishment Due”.

If you have ever been a fan of Megadeth, even in passing, you really need to see them live. There is no stage show, just guys playing…and playing well. I grew up with them, idolized them, and still follow them even though only Mustaine still remains. They will rock your world. You might find yourself banging your head even though you have never done it before. It is not that you don’t like to bang your head, it is that you haven’t yet been to this show.

Also, vote on Tuesday, it may be important.

Red Sox Series and Dogma

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I have again been quite lacking in the supposed ‘daily update’ department of late. I could likely have banged something out over the last couple of days just for the sake of making a post, but it would have been pretty poor even by my meager standards. Who knew I had standards?

• So it turns out that the Red Sox really did win the world series and lift the ‘Curse of the Bambino’. That is great and all, I am very happy to see someone other than the Yankees take it home this year. I think a lot of the baseball fans in the U.S. are the same way. There were a few quotes in the news articles about the Red Sox win, however, that really make me think the people in Boston may be a bit delusional, if not clinically insane:

All the psychic pain doesn’t just disappear in one day. On Thursday, some Red Sox fans were cautious, and even irrational, about accepting their good fortune. Several said they read the sports pages first thing to make sure the win actually happened. Gilligan looked in another section of the paper.
“I checked the obituaries to make sure I was still alive,” he said.

Okay, I know it has been a while, but come on! I understand that his statement was likely not meant as fact (though with the rabid BoSox fans one can never know), but it is just not that big a deal. Beating the Yankees after being down 3-0 in the previous series was a big deal, as it had NEVER happened. Not by any team in the entire history of professional baseball. Yet, the BoSox fans wait until they sweep another team in the ‘World Series’ to start to express their disbelief? Was the ‘Curse of the Bambino’ so much a part of life in Boston that they really, truly believed that the Sox were never going to win it again?

Of course I only bring this up since it makes it seem possible that my beloved Cubs will be able to rid themselves of the ‘Curse of the Goat’. That will be entirely necessary if they are to avoid the plan that I laid out in a previous post, and fulfill my prophecy of winning the World Series in 2007. The significance of which is that they would be the only sporting team to ever go exactly a century between title wins. I am a Cubs fan, we have to have goals too.

• I took in the movie Dogma over the weekend. It was released in 1999 and I have somehow just never found the time to watch it. Sure they play it on lots of networks at this point, but it is the type of movie that you really have to see without censorship to truly appreciate. I really loved the movie and plan to watch it at least once more just to make sure that I didn’t miss any of the innuendo. It is wonderful to have an open mind. I am not even going to go into a ‘psuedo-review’ of this one though, as there are other people that have done it so much better than I could ever hope to.

Here is the CAP Alert guy with his ‘Full Review’ of the movie. You will either laugh or cry, depending on your particular faith, but it is definite must read material when researching a movie such as this. It is not my intention to rip on anybody for being really small minded and simple, but (there is always a ‘but’) this guy fell off of his rocker a long time ago and is only still rocking in his own head, if you get my drift. The only thing that keeps him out of the mental hospital, likely, is that there are a lot of people that think just like he does. Scary thought, considering that one of the two presidential candidates share in his beliefs. I have no proof of his sanity, or lack thereof, but I do have a single quote from his review of the Dogma movie:

Since the release of Dogma in 1999 it has apparently served well the appetites of the unbelievers and of the situational and conditional Christian — those who are Christian only when and where it suits them. By deeper inspection of the letters of the many who claim to be Christian have told me they found “deeper insight” and “spiritual fulfillment” in Dogma, they each have only been apparently duped into questioning and doubting not only God’s Word but God Himself; into thinking it is good to question everything. What a dilemma! While it is good to question most worldly things to avoid being deceived, one must assume deception is the goal. God has no plan or goal to deceive us in any way. Thus, the promotion of free-thinking by Dogma targeted at the Gospel and His Word cheapens for the gullible and uninformed their perception of God AND His Word.

So, then, it is really good to question everything on earth. Yet, it is not good to question everything on earth. You should only question the things that are not by the hand of God…Oh, I get it. So it is okay to question whether the pizza really had double pepperoni, but it is not okay to question whether God looked on and watched a child die in agony. It is okay to question why there is not more World Support for the thousands of people who die in underdeveloped countries every year, yet, it is not okay to question God’s plan for whatever is left of them when ,and if, they finally make it to heaven.

Mankind has tried to use religion to explain everything since the beginning of time. Don’t you think it is just about time that we start to live for now?

The whole “worshipping god” thing has pushed us further back in technology (and any other race ever constructed) than we would be if we just finally gave up on religion.

I guess God, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and lots of other figures who never existed, in reality, will laugh when I come to greet them. It is a choice that I have made.

Note to parents out there. Don’t try to tell your kids that all of these mythical beings exist, then tell them that they don’t exist…Except God…

Well, at least my parents went the extra mile and never killed any of us. They also killed all of the ‘mysterious gift bringer’ myths by the time I was twelve. I don’t know if either of them had the cajones to take a stance on whether or not there was a ‘God’, but I think mom did a better job of dispelling myths about it. By the time I was 12 I knew that there was no one looking out for me, what I did/said was it. That all worked out well, as I did grow up. Religion is only Myth in my mind.

][V][ EGADET ][-][ concert preparation

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There are only eight days now until I am going to be seeing Megadeth in concert. While I am as giddy as a school-girl on the one hand, I am also a bit apprehensive. The previous bands that my wife and I saw, including, but not limited to (no way I am gonna link them all): Dokken, Dio, Korn, Motorhead, Scorpions, Ozzy, WhiteSnake, Iron Maiden, Korn, Marilyn Manson, Disturbed, Chevelle, hell there were a few others (many more if you count the bands that didn’t play the main stage). They were all viewed from a VIP area in an arena that has security posted to keep the homocidal lunatics away from us. Don’t get me wrong, I can throw my fist in the air and bang my head with the best of them, used to even engage in smashing my body against the bodies of other people while listening to really loud music. The thing is that I am not sixteen anymore, no matter how much I try to pretend that I am.

The thing, the one thing, is that I am still a bit nervous about everyone around me. True, there is a ‘pit section’ in damn near every venue that a band plays; That is the place that I would have owned a decade ago. Now, for better or worse, I just want to go and hear it all live, throw my fist in the air and be a part of the the experience. What I don’t want is the guy next to me to get a bit too drunk and start picking fights. Of course the adrenaline rush that comes with seeing your idols play live might just make me immune to the drunken (more so than me) idiots that would try to fight anything that wiggled. Yet, those idiots will be on the same rush. Bleh. All I really have to say is, thank the random fluctuations of time and space for structured seating, without it I might have to re-live my youth by beating someone to death (Not that I actually beat anyone to their death in my youth; at least not that you can prove it).

The interesting thing about Megadeth, and my desire to see them live, is that there is only one guy left in the band that was there at the beginning. That guy is, of course, Dave Mustaine. For whatever reasons, a guitarist named ‘Chris Poland’ played the lead on their first album, as well as playing the lead on their latest album, yet he won’t be on tour with them. David Ellefson has been the bassist since the band’s beginning, but he is not going to be playing with them either. The original drummer is also gone, though I can not place his name. I think Nick Menza is going to be playing with them, while I am thinking that their original drummer had a name like ‘Gar Samuelson’. So, in essence, I am watching the Dave Mustaine show when I go to see Megadeth, but, you know what, that is what I want to see.

-All of the musicians mentioned can be found by going to Artist Direct.com and entering their names. I just happen to remember all of their names since I grew up with/worshipped this band.-

My fascination with Dave Mustaine goes way back. He was, of course, one of the original members of Metallica. He still has writing credits on many of the songs on Metallica’s first two albums. He can play a guitar like no one should ever be able to, but, he does it with a unique (totally untrained) approach. To hell with the musical scales! If it sounds weird/cool to play an A-sharp, followed by an E-flat, he will do it (at least in the glory days of Megadeth). He just doesn’t give a damn for conforming to anything (though it is pretty obvious that he has taken a class or two in musical theory at this point).

The one thing that really stands out about Mustaine, though, is his voice. He seems to be on the edge of sanity when he is singing the lyrics, yet he seems so approachable when you hear him do an interview. I don’t know if you can actually teach someone how to sound insane, but if it is possible, Mustaine should open a school. His voice is, very obviously, not meant to be a singing voice. It is more a satirical rendition of the ‘we hate you, you must die’ voices of the late ’90’s. I am not sure if that is what he was aiming for, but that was what I took it as. Yet, were it not for that unique voice, and some hammering riffs, Megadeth might just be a foot-note in the history of music. Of course the fact that I am going to watch them live in 2004, when they haven’t put out a decent album in more than a decade, might say more about me than it does about them. In my defense I would like to say that going to this concert is not going to slow down my graying hair, nor do I think that it will cure baldness. It is just a ‘must see’ show. It very well could be the last time that anyone is able to see what is left of Megadeth in a show.

As far as the rapidly graying hair, I will be the only ‘distinguished gentleman’ at the Megadeth show. Unless, of course, no one else has listened to them in the last decade. Yes, brethren in the graying/baldness category, that is what I want to get out of a concert. ( <—Sarcasm ).