Don't call it a comeback

I finished watching Inland Empire last night, and I did not like it. Mostly because I did not get it. Don't worry, there is no way to spoil it by me saying this: I did like how the descent into madness was portrayed, but I felt like the motifs did not really serve a purpose. Again, that's probably because I just did not get it. I had to read a plot summary afterwards just to be able to make heads and tails of it.

It's like déjà vu all over again

We carved pumpkins for Halloween and gave out candy, and we also watched Scream, which I had actually never seen before. And there is this really hilarious, possibly embarrassing, line by Neve Campbell in the movie, which I used as the title for this post. So remember folks: careful when using those fancy words, unless you're 100% sure what they really mean, especially when you use them in a sentence.

The truth and nothing but the truth.

The other day we heard an advertisement for a movie on the radio. And you know how some movies can't really fend for themselves, so the best way the advertisers can think of to promote the movie is to compare it to similar ones, in the hope that it appeals to the same target audience. As in "Star Trek fans will love this" or "Even funnier than Cheaper by the Dozen". Yeah, they try to make it sound good by association, which is already pretty lame.

However, the movie we heard advertised, and I don't have the slightest idea what it is called, what it is about, who made it or who is in it, is better than the last two Ocean's Eleven movies. Just the last two. Not the first one, oh no siree, only better than Ocean's 12 and 13, but not better than Ocean's 11. You got that? Cause we don't wanna get into any trouble here for false advertising or nothing when people realize our movie is actually not as good as Ocean's 11. It's a pretty good movie, don't get us wrong, but when you compare it to Ocean's 11, well it just falls short of the mark. And this is so obvious that we couldn't possibly have gotten away with claiming it anyway, so we opted for the truth. Love that integrity. People, we tried to make a good movie here, and you can check our website for a complete list of movies it's better than, but when it came to Ocean's 11 (just the first one though), we watched the two again and again, but in the end it was all too noticeable, that Ocean's 11 is better. But it's really awesome, right? So go ahead, watch our movie, it might be almost really awesome.

That also reminds me of that movie advertising strategy where they quote reviews, and with some you can tell they were having trouble finding anything good written about the movie anywhere, and so the quotes are kinda generic and unenthusiastic. I think the above movie was actually quoting a review, but I'm not sure anymore.

Also, have any of you seen the recent K-Mart commercials? The ones where the family opens Christmas presents, and the kids get this stuff they really love, and Dad freaks out because that must have been really expensive? Well, Dad can relax, cause this isn't the fancy Hannah Montana pajamas from the mall. Nope, this is that cheap stuff. From K-Mart. What was he thinking?

Leaders of the Poo School

When I came home from work on Tuesday I couldn't connect to the Internet. I checked a couple of things and couldn't find the problem, so I tried calling our provider, but there was no dial tone. And since our phone and internet provider are the same, they committed to restoring service by Friday, which they did. That's still 4 days without. Anyway, if you read the comments to the last post, you already know that Bo Snagley has eaten a plate of dried ladybugs which officially makes him a level 7 wizard, and he thinks it's a big deal. Level 6 and 7 are relics of the old academy standard, and were only retained to appease a handful of senior councilmen. So usually you have to do something silly and they just let you advance. Oh well, it makes him happy I guess.

Who knows that song by Lil Wayne with Jay-Z in it where Wayne talks about the seasons hating on him and the refrain has some singing "Hey Mr. Carter tell me where have you been" or something to that effect? Whoever knows it, raise your hand. Don't be ashamed, it's ok. If you haven't already noticed this do me a favor next time you hear that song (You can say it was on the radio, I won't double-check and spare you some embarrassment): Pay particular attention to Wayne's voice. Now is it me, or does he record his raps while squeezing out a number two in the bathroom? Further proof is this line: "I flush 'em, and watch 'em go down the drain quick". (Got that off of The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive, and the song is called "Mr. Carter", by the way). As we learned in Biz Markies's Toilet Stool Rap, writing raps on the toilet is nothing new, but building your flow on top of that has got to be ground-breaking.

We watched "Burn After Reading" and it was hilarious.

The city never sleeps, just the people in it.

We had a really great weekend, thanks for asking. Our friend Joey came to visit for a week, and we saw Avenue Q, which was really awesome I thought. It's a musical with puppets. Earlier in the week we also watched Pineapple Express, which we all really liked as well. On Saturday we went over the Brooklyn Bridge, saw the WTC site, had lunch in Little Italy and saw frogs climbing out of barrels in Chinatown. Luckily the vendor had a handy metal rod to help them back into the barrel. That night we went to the Jersey shore and walked along the beach, and I was later denied access to a bar because I only had a federally issued ID, not a state-issued driver's license. So we went to a bar that didn't bother carding. So much for the facts.

Here's what's really important though: Either some people in this town work way too hard, or the city just makes you really sleepy. While riding the subway on the way to Brooklyn (yeah, we took the easy way out), a young man was falling asleep in his seat, leaning on the unsuspecting people who sat down next to him. The first person I saw this happen to just got up and let him sprawl out, the next lady was rather large, and it was hilarious to see him lean on her shoulder. After that people kept nudging him, or just laughing, and it was quite entertaining. Later on in Chinatown a man had decided to go to sleep on the sidewalk. While this second case was probably more sad than funny, you've got to be one tired mothertrucker to be able to sleep right there on a sidewalk with hundreds of people pushing by. In the middle of the day. What's your favorite Led Zeppelin album?

Cookies are yum.

There were two regions of mainland New Zealand that we hadn't visited yet. Now there is only one, the Coromandel Peninsula, as we took a little trip around the East Cape last weekend. Well, we started on Thursday and were supposed to return on Monday, but the weather turned to a word I should not use in public, and so we headed back on Sunday already, skipping some excellent walks we had planned. Well, two walks, and maybe we'll get a chance to still do one of them, because it's on the way between Gisborne and Whakatane and definitely not completely out of reach from lovely Maketu. Now it doesn't surprise me anymore to find skateparks in every little pothole, even in the most remote areas of New Zealand, but last weekend, not only did we see the easternmost lighthouse in the world (I'm still not sure if such a thing can actually exist, what with our planet turning out to be round and all, in a surprising twist that I'm sure the president of the Committee for the Terrestrial rim Enlargement Project, C-TrEP, never saw coming), but I also skated, albeit very briefly on account of the structure needing to be swept in a bad way, the easternmost skatepark in the world. If they have a skatepark on the Chatham Islands, it's only the easternmost mainland skatepark. And to stick with superlatives, we saw a very long wharf at Tolaga Bay, which is the longest of it's kind in New Zealand, and maybe the southern hemisphere. The signs and guidebooks don't seem to be 100% sure about that one.

Christina collected heaps of shells for her evergrowing collection and we also saw White Island, and the smoke it emits, from the coast. There are not a lot of people in the East Cape area, but those that do live there all seem to own horses. There was one in the reserve we camped in on Friday night, and a sign telling people not to take horses into the playground in another little town. Actually, it was the town with the skatepark mentioned above. And horses horses everywhere we looked. And someone had recycled their microwave by using it as a mailbox. Also, the peaks of the mountain range on the peninsula had snow on them, while the sun was keeping us nice and warm along the coast.

But the most important thing is that we went and watched the Simpsons movie yesterday, as movies are only $8 on Tuesdays in Te Puke. It was pretty good I thought and everything looked real fancy compared to the TV episodes, eh.