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December 29, 2003The Brawny Man is dead. Long live the Brawny Man.
The new Brawny Man, at right--metrosexual, ethnically ambiguous, and not at all resembling a '70s porn star.
Click here for the full article on how and why this transformation came about.
Posted by patrick at 06:03 PM | Comments (1)
December 28, 2003
Christmas 2003
Once again, Christmas has come and gone. It was a mellow affair, filled with good food and good loot. My friends and family bought me very appropriate gifts. Looking at the list below, I wonder what a stranger might suppose about me, based solely on my Christmas gifts:
A very nice (read: more than I'd ever spend on my own clothes) sweater and leather jacket
A glass chess set, a la "X-Men"
A 3-D ship puzzle
Pirate-themed Sea Monkeys and a "Kiss me, I'm a pirate!" sticker
A fair number of books, including a book about books
A Starbucks gift card
Three or four free car wash coupons--she's a subtle one, my mom.
A pre-owned N64 game system and "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time"
Three jars of pickled garlic
A cheese grater and colander
Socks and underwear
* * * * *
I went miniature golfing with my girlfriend today. I beat her, just barely, having blown much of my lead at one of those holes that either lets you off under par or smacks you around for seven or eight strokes. Driving into the establishment, I was handed a small advertisement for a magic show with my parking pass and my change.
I took their advice and skipped the magic show.
Posted by patrick at 11:01 PM | Comments (5)
December 20, 2003
I do hope my bed and breakfast establishment is cozy, at least...
I usually delete my spam without a second thought, but I received a piece of it tonight that deserves a passing mention for no other reason than sheer oddity.
Apparently, my "Bed and Breakfast Website is NOT being SEEN! Why? NO ONE CAN FIND IT!"
That's disheartening news, definitely, but not surprising. I can't find my bed and breakfast website either, nor did I even know that I had one. I don't want to think about how long my ignorance would have continued, had Regal Telecom not sent me this very concerned--and obviously very personal--message.
Seriously, though, all kidding aside, this has got to be some of the most random spam I've ever received. At least with the penile and breast augmentation messages, the spammers are bound to send it to recipients possessed of the right primary or secondary sex organs to make it pertinent--and the debt reduction e-mails are only indicative of our credit-mad culture. But spam about Bed and Breakfast websites? If you take one thousand people at random, how many of them A) have a bed and breakfast place, B) have a website for it, and C) haven't adequately monitored its presence on the web?
I don't know if the folks at Regal Telecom are quixotic or just plain stupid, but I had myself a chuckle over their message, regardless.
Posted by patrick at 04:40 AM | Comments (4)
December 17, 2003
"Lord of the Rings" wrap-up: The Law of Diminished "Return"s
This has not been my year for movie trilogies. I saw “The Return of the King” at a midnight screening last night, and I must admit, it was something of a disappointment. There will be spoilers aplenty in this entry, so consider yourself warned.
Before I go into why the movie disappointed me, let me “set the stage” for my comments, so to speak. I’ve read the LOTR trilogy twice, but not recently. I get a little turned around on some of the non-fellowship character names, and I can’t keep Merry and Pippin straight to save my life. I was perfectly content to buy the regular DVDs for both of the first two films, thus denying myself the extended versions, the Gollum bust, and all the other little LOTR trinkets that were packaged with the later DVDs. I cheerfully admit to skipping a goodly chunk of the Elvish poetry in the books. However, I really enjoyed the first two movies, and was looking forward to how the third film might cap off the trilogy. As you can gather, although I’m not the most ardent LOTR fan to walk the earth, I’m no Johnny-come-lately, either.
Of the 133 reviews linked to at Rotten Tomatoes, all but three of them were positive. Granted, some of those categorized as positive reviews were only lukewarm, but for every middle-of-the-road positive review, there were at least three or four reviewers who shouted from the journalistic mountaintops that this was the best movie—or movie trilogy, at least—ever made.
I just don’t get it.
The fighting: Although the scope of the battles in “The Return of the King” clearly dwarfs that of the besieging of Helm’s Deep in “The Two Towers,” it’s the same old thing. For all the countless man-hours spent on programming CGI armies to beat the ever-lovin’ snot out of each other, I was still most impressed with the minor skirmishes in “The Fellowship of the Ring,” where the fights were on a small enough scale that you could actually see what was going on, and be impressed by it.
Ringwraiths: Boy, did they ever get short shrift in the second and third film. They were terrifying and active in “The Fellowship of the Ring”. In the last two films, all they do is ride around on their Winged Beasts. And while on the subject of said creatures, there’s a world of difference between the Ringwraiths themselves doing scary/cool/etc. stuff, and their Winged Beast doing scary/cool/etc. stuff. That’s great that the steeds can pick up huge clawfuls of soldiers and/or horses, but that doesn’t serve to make the Ringwraiths themselves any more frightening as foes. And whose idea was it to give the Witch-King the Winged Beast with the crepe-paper neck? Aowen’s sword cut through it like a hot knife through butter.
Witch-King: Neat pseudo-Greek tragedy mask notwithstanding, he never got a chance to be intimidating.
Character development: Nope, sorry—not in this installment of the trilogy. Everybody does what they were destined to do, which leaves them static. Sam’s devotion to Frodo comes to a head in this film, since Frodo’s in a worse way than he ever was before. Everybody else is pretty much on auto-pilot.
Saruman:
Peter Jackson: “We’re cutting Christopher Lee from the last film.”
Faceless Underling: “Hey, Mr. Jackson. Won’t the audience want to know what became of Saurman?”
Peter Jackson: “Um…nah.”
Seriously, that was a bad move on Peter Jackson’s part. To read this article, it doesn’t sound like they went about notifying Lee in the proper way. C’mon, Jackson. Christopher Lee is an 81-year-old LOTR-loving film veteran. Give him his damn screen time and give us one less war-elephant sequence.
Galadriel’s gift: Showing its presentation is a flashback was unnecessary. Jackson could have spent the extra thirty seconds in the first film and had the giving of the phial to Frodo fall in sequential order. Not only that, but it would have thinned “The Return of the King” out by another half minute. At three and a half hours, it could have used whatever trimming was possible.
Multiple endings:
Peter Jackson: “Let’s use ‘em.”
Faceless Underling: “Hey, Mr. Jackson. Won’t the audience be unnecessarily confused by the fact that you keep fading to black with the end of each scene near the conclusion of the movie?”
Peter Jackson: “um…nah.”
Gimli: In the last two films (“The Return of the King” especially), he’s nothing more than an incidental source of comic relief.
Legolas: Chicks dig that Aryan look, so we don’t have to give him much to do this time around.
It’s a good thing I’ve been so unimpressed with the first two “Star Wars” prequels. If it sucks, which I fully expect, at least I won’t go through the shock and heartache that accompanied my opening night jaunts to “Matrix Revolutions” and “The Return of the King”.
Posted by patrick at 04:36 PM | Comments (4)
December 08, 2003
Sittin' on the dock of the bay, wastin' time...
It's Monday morning, and I'm as free as a bird. Granted, I have yet to turn in my end-of-the-quarter essay for my Early Japanese Literature class, but until I've had a chance to talk to the professor about my draft tomorrow, there's really nothing I can accomplish on that front. I'm in the pleasant position of having many things I could be doing today (writing, cleaning, running sundry errands, perhaps even braving the mall and doing a bit of Christmas shopping), but nothing that needs to get done. I'll be rehearsing with some of my "Midsummer" cast members tonight, but that still leaves me almost ten hours to fill however I choose. After how hectic this quarter ultimately became, this is a nice change of pace.
* * * * *
Remember the lady who was trampled during Wal-Mart's DVD sale near the end of last month? According to this Associated Press article, she's made "numerous injury claims against stores since 1987, including nine against [Wal-Mart]." What's more, records show that "Patricia VanLester, a 41-year-old former Wal-Mart employee, has received thousands of dollars in injury and workers' compensation settlements from Wal-Mart."
This is all sounding pretty suspicious. Even if you want to give this woman the benefit of the doubt and assume she's not faking her injuries, she's stll an idiot for returning time after time to establishments where she consistently gets hurt.
Posted by patrick at 09:54 AM | Comments (4)
December 05, 2003
What a relief--other cultures are crazy, too!
Today was my last day of class for the quarter. I don’t have any finals, so except for an Early Japanese Literature essay I’m still in the process of writing, I’m done with all school-related tasks through the beginning of January.
Speaking of Early Japanese Literature, a few girls from the class gave a presentation of mythical creatures this afternoon—one of which was the tanuki. Although tanukis are real animals (a raccoon dog, basically), they’ve historically been considered supernatural creatures in Japan. They often turn into random objects, which makes Tanuki Mario’s ability to turn into an invincible (albeit stationary) monk statue in Nintendo’s "Super Mario Brothers 3" much less random.
What Tanuki Mario’s inclusion in the game never suggested, however, was the testicular might with which tanukis were attributed in Japanese folklore. The real-life tanukis are endowed with rather large testicles due to the competitive nature of mating, but the mythological tanukis put them to shame.
In folklore, tanukis would drag their testes behind them as they walked, wear them as a kimono, or even use them as a drum. Some legends suggest that the tanukis could stretch their scrotums to the size of eight tatami mats—or even the size of one thousand tatami mats.
Let’s think about this. A tatami mat is eighteen square feet in size. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre. It would take just shy of two and a half tanuki scrotums to cover an acre. With 2,904 tanukis, one could scrotally cover UC Riverside’s entire 1,200-acre campus.
You’ll never look at "Super Mario Brothers 3" the same way, will you? I won’t even tell you what kappa (the mythological creatures upon which SMB’s turtle-like koopa was based) were known for doing to their victims…
For more information on tanukis, check out this guy's site.
Posted by patrick at 02:12 AM | Comments (4)