Who’s bright idea was it to put Labor Day weekend at the end of my business trip? You wouldn’t think that Wichita airport would have a security line longer than Orlando, would you? I mean, the building is just physically smaller, ain’t it? Yet, here I sit, 2 hours later, finally able to sit and wait for my already hour-late flight.
Oh well. At least I have the connection in Dallas to look forward too…
Hey, Toto, guess what? I’m not not in Kansas anymore!
Ya know, I’ll bet Kansanians never get tired of hearing that line. Yet, I still wonder about the recent moves here to deport anyone who names their child “Dorothy” and to extend terrier hunting season an extra month…
I haven’t been in this state since the summer of 1973 when we drove through on our way to Colorado (being chased by tornadoes, no less). All I remember is that it was very flat and smelled like cow dung. Last night, driving across the prairie with bugs the size of vampire bats splatting against my windshield, I resisted the urge to open the windows and take a whiff.
I was listening to NPR this morning and heard a story about Belle Fourche, South Dakota, and their new monument for being the geographic center of the United States (counting Alaska and Hawaii, which I suppose we gotta, or they’re gonna whine).
Apparently, the only thing that Belle Fourche was known for prior to this was a reference in the John Wayne movie, The Cowboys, where he leads a cattle drive made up of young boys (wait…that didn’t sound right). Anyway, I liked that movie and remembered that he dies in it (um, spoiler alert?). This led me to try to remember all the times the hero, John Wayne, died in his movies.
I knew about The Alamo and his last movie, The Shootist. And, of course, one of my favorite movies is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (where he doesn’t actually die on screen). But how, oh how, would I ever find out the rest?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne#Character_deaths
Thank you, internets. I am at peace.
Did you know that of the three signs of the Apocalypse that are currently showing or being prepared to be shown to the unsuspecting theater-going public, two of them involve Jason Lee?
My favoritest source of funny in the world, April Winchell, has just updated her site and stepped into the 20th Century. As a special treat, she also decided to update her mp3 library with a bunch of new crap and better quality versions of old crap.
I won’t link any of the audio here, so you can suck down her bandwidth directly (um, yeah, moving along). But she’s got things organized into piles like:
* Teen Spirit Covers (Polka!!)
* Corporate Music (Dryclean When You Care)
* TV Theme Covers (Sammy Davis, Jr., you’re gonna make it after all!)
* Spoken Word (Just when you thought you’d never find that bedwetting hypnosis tape.)
* Audio Collage and Mash-Ups (Download I Wanna Be Sedated by the Dictionaraoke using my bandwidth.)
* Celebrities Who Insist On Singing (no further description necessary)
* Celebrities Who Can’t Sing, So They Talk To Music
* Things You Probably Weren’t Supposed To Hear (I love the Jim Backus one.)
* Beatles Covers
* Stairway to Heaven
* Learn Italian with Fabio
* Chicken Songs
* Terrifying Christian Recordings (“Menstruation is God’s Plan”)
* Bizarre Covers (“Black Hole Sun” by Steve and Eydie gave me this brain tumor!)
* And sooooo much more!
Anywho, with categories like these, how can you resist wallowing in the April freshness?
[ cross-posted at This Blog Smells Funny ]
I don’t know which is worse.
The fact that I staggered to my desk and pre-caffeinated read the title of the last post as “I think I just FARTED a little…” or the fact that it’s the only thing I have to blog about.
We went to see Stardust late last night, and it was fabulous. I doubt that it will be a huge blockbuster, but it already takes its place alongside The Princess Bride, Big Fish, and Willow as one of my favorite fairy tale movies. Robert DeNiro is wonderful, as are Michelle Pfeiffer and Claire Danes. Ricky Gervais does a nice little turn as a merchant in (apparently) illicit lightning bolts, and Peter O’Toole was great as the dying King.
What I liked most about it was that it was played exactly as something that might have come from the collection of the Brothers Grimm. It was a new story, set in a new world, but it felt like something my great grandmother would have read to me when I was a small boy. I could imagine that she had done so but that I’d just forgotten it.
While I wouldn’t say that this is a kids’ movie, I worry about the pronouncements in the media that you shouldn’t take kids to see it. Yes, it’s violent, and I probably wouldn’t want to deal with a 6-year-old’s nightmares, but I can honestly say that I wouldn’t have made my kids wait until they were 13 to see it.
Like the Grimm’s tales, it doesn’t pull its punches. The witches are bad, and they do wicked things (including a bit of animal mutilation). The evil princes are jealous and scheming, and they kill each other in evil ways. It was by turns sweet and romantic, then cruel and kinda scary…just like the original Snow White and Cinderella before they were Disneyfied.
At first, I thought it was funny. Here’s a friend sending me a goofy e-mail about being stuck in Nigeria and needing cash. Ha ha. Nice joke. So, I replied with a similar message about being in a South African prison and needing money to bribe the guards.
Well, it turns out that it wasn’t a joke. No, she’s not trapped in Nigeria, but instead the e-mail that came from her Gmail account was from a hacker. Apparently, many Gmail accounts have been hacked into. D’oh!
I’m relatively computer savvy, and I always pay suspicious attention to e-mails that seem to come from friends and relatives on other e-mail accounts. Yet, somehow, I was blindsided by this. Somehow, I thought Google was above being hacked or something? Sheesh.
Of course, this goes way beyond a simple prank e-mail. Thanks to Google’s insistence that you never need to delete anything and the convenience of having all your stuff accessible online, most people have years worth of e-mails in their archive folder. Emails with bank account numbers, usernames, passwords, other e-mail addresses, friends and family names and numbers and addresses… My friend immediately went to her eBay and Paypal accounts and, sure enough, there was unauthorized activity using her Gmail address.
So, here’s what you need to do (immediately):
There are some other good suggestions (and horror stories) in this thread.
Apparently, I exacerbated my hay fever or summer cold or whatever the hell on Saturday, because by Sunday morning, I felt like crap. So much so that the planned meeting of the minds on Sunday had to be cancelled. Bummer. I was looking forward to pre-baby pictures.
On the bright side, I did finally finish Harry Potter, and I really, really liked it. I thought it was a little slow to get going, but the last third of the book was non-stop action. Without spoiling anything, what I found amazing was that she managed to touch on, if not feature, every character (other than Moaning Myrtle). Most of them had a pretty significant role in the story, not just “Oh, look, there’s so-and-so.” Not only that, but she actually re-visited or at least mentioned every single place and most (if not all) of the magical creatures.
I kept thinking about how there has always been this “will they finish the movie series with the same actors?” buzz going on after each Potter movie is released, and all during the last half of the book, I tried to picture anyone turning down the chance to do this one. Fortunately, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint all settled down and earlier this year committed to stay to the bitter end. So, now, I’m just hoping that they don’t shortchange the last two films like they kinda did Order of the Phoenix. This last book, especially, deserves the full Lord of the Rings treatment.
We also went and saw The Bourne Ultimatum at some point. Very, very cool flick. I wouldn’t recommend seeing it without watching the first two (or at least Bourne Supremacy), but that’s about as great a trio of films as one could wish to see.
