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November 29, 2004Money, money, money...
I'm the 666,338,940th richest person on earth! Discover how rich you are! >> |
Or the top 11%, if you prefer. A real eye-opener, that.
Click over to the site, enter in your yearly earnings, and see how you rank.
Those making the U.S. federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour only pull down $7,420 a year--below the U.S. poverty line of $15,260 for a family of three, $12,120 for a couple, or $8,980 for an individual. However, that person still places in the top 14% of global earning power.
Posted by patrick at 11:02 PM | Comments (1)
November 27, 2004
The Angst in Yellow...
I know I've added captions to the occasional photo of running alpacas, or added a pithy speech bubble to still-caps from "The Seventh Seal" now and then, and I've even taken a stab as how an Islamic theocracy would deal with the Hamburglar, but what you see here is my first real stab at piecing somebody together from nothing with a picture manipulation program (the free Paint.net): A hypothetical one-sheet (movie poster) to accompany my screenplay draft from this quarter of school.
"Not getting much in the way of Grand Guignol or exciting zombie action adventure from this," sez my professor. "This poster looks more like a morose left-bank love triangle movie with lots of cigarettes and pointless conversations."
I think he's hit the nail on the head, dammit. The floating heads of Taye Diggs and Emily Perkins aren't helping me shake that low-rent "Unbearable Lightness of Being" vibe, either.
Posted by patrick at 06:18 AM | Comments (4)
November 25, 2004
SoupMan needs our help!
For the last year, David Timothy (a.k.a. the SoupMan) has spent 60 to 70 hours a week running a soup kitchen out of a van, serving up some 3,000 meals a month.
Read this article about him from Yahoo! News and visit his site.
You made a donation, right? No? Not to crassly lay down the guilt-smack on you or anything, but:
"The only day Timothy missed ladling up soup was when his wife died — as she slept in the early hours of Oct. 25, her 48th birthday. He went back to delivering meals the next day."
What have you (or I, admittedly) done for the homeless lately? We've been a lot more lax for a lot less pressing of reasons, I'd wager.
Okay, you just went back and made a donation, right? No? Still? Okay, I didn't want to have to bust out the big guns. You had your chance:
"...Timothy not only feeds the hungry but also finds toys for homeless children on their birthdays. For most of them, it's the only gift they receive."
In all seriousness, send SoupMan a couple of bucks. I donated the bill with President Grant on it, in case anybody is wondering whether or not I'd put my money where my mouth is.
Posted by patrick at 01:30 AM | Comments (0)
November 22, 2004
I just hope Riverside doesn't run out of movie theaters any time soon...
I’ve been meaning to put in an entry for the last few days, but I’ve been swamped with work. I’m no less swamped now, and I’m actually girding my loins for an all-nighter tonight, but I figured I could treat myself to a few minutes of updating the ol’ website before taking my seat at the oar again. Or my spot in the coal mine. Or start pushing that boulder up the hill again, Sisyphus-style. The comparisons abound.
They’re tearing down one of the two defunct movie theaters in Canyon Crest Towne Center. It wouldn’t be so sad if they’d just knock it down and be done with it, but they seem content to leave half the building ruined and sagging, a torturous diorama to anybody for whom either of those theaters factored into their younger years.
My first date ever was at that theater—“Jurassic Park,” followed by pepperoni-and-pineapple pizza at the Pizza Hut right around the corner (similarly departed, although the storefront endures as a clothing boutique or some-such). I’d seen the movie the day before with a friend of mine, just to make sure that it would pass muster for a date. To drive by that doomed theater and watch it wobble in punch-drunk perpetuity like some Mortal Kombat character denied the grace of a fatality…it plucks at my sense of nostalgia like a harp. Every time I pass it, I feel like I'm living in Larry McMurtry's "The Last Picture Show".
My friend Mike managed to squeeze his hand under the chain-link fence surrounding the theater and snag a small piece of the former roof’s Spanish tile for me. Okay, technically the Spanish tile has as much to do with my memories of the place as do, say, the paper towel dispenser in the bathroom or the green exit signs, but hey, I’m thankful to get a memento of the place at all. You go, Mike.
In other news, I’ll be spending some unexpected time with my friend Rich (the Jardinains addict) tomorrow night. It’ll mean pulling another all-nighter tomorrow night to stay afloat, but he’s worth it. Also, although my upstairs neighbors didn’t clear out as anticipated on November 20, they did spend all of today loading a U-Haul truck, and their kitschy patio decorations have disappeared. I can hear them goose-stepping around up there right now—hey, that’s what it sounds like—so tomorrow will probably be the blessed day o’ departure. Their dog will be gone, never to “barken” my door again.
Posted by patrick at 09:16 PM | Comments (2)
November 15, 2004
A curmudgeon before his time...
Five days. A mere five days from now, the man living above me will move elsewhere. What's more, his depressed Doberman will be accompanying him.
The dog barks and howls late into the night whenever his master is gone--which is often. The damn thing was at it until 2 a.m. the other day. This morning, he piped up bright and early at 4:45 a.m. Good times.
Don't get me wrong--I'm a night-owl, and often awake at those ungodly hours anyway, but it's still damned annoying. If I'm up that late, I'm probably working on my screenplay draft and could use some peace and quiet. It's not so bad during the day, except for that day last week, when the dog kept up a constant chorus of barking and howling from 6 a.m. through to four the next morning.
I feel bad for the dog, who obviously howls and barks because he's unhappy and/or lonely, but enough is enough. I went to discuss the situation with the management (again), and that's when I received the blessed news.
On November 20, my worries will melt away like icicles in the sun. No more Hound of the Baskervilles. No more loud arguments between the dog's owner and his girlfriend at 1:30 a.m. right next to their open bedroom window. No more parking their SUV in such a way as to let its sphere of influence include a good portion of my parking spot. They're outta here. I'll slaughter the proverbial fattened calf and hope for better luck with my next set of neighbors.
Posted by patrick at 04:09 PM | Comments (4)
November 14, 2004
Get behind me, "Halo 2"
I went to a party in Los Angeles yesterday evening--a 24th birthday party, for my friend Eve. My ex and I went in dutch to buy her a plastic elephant that defecates cigarettes when you push down on its trunk. Yeah, only the classiest gift would suffice for dear Eve.
One of the two guys living at the party site (not Eve's place) owns "Halo 2," so I finally got a chance to see what it's all about. I'd never even seen the first "Halo" before last night. I wasn't sure how I'd react. Would I succumb to the "Halo" addiction? Would I sell my organs to buy my own XBox and spend every waking moment playing the game?
In a word, no.
I played for perhaps 15 or 20 minutes, and got spanked. Handily. I spent much of the time trying to figure out which button was going to let me swap weapons and running in circles around a level map the layout of which thoroughly eluded me. Every now and then, the other guy would pop up with his rocket-launcher (which wouldn't respawn since he had it, thus turning my serial annihilation into a serious examination of the issue of class warfare in video games--the haves versus the have-nots, if you will) and splattered me all over the beautifully rendered landscape.
As my viscera bubbled and blossomed time and time again, I saw two paths before me.
The first path was one of casual "Halo" play, a path that would basically set me up to be everybody's frag-puppy on XBox Live. Oh, what fun.
The second path was that of the "Halo" addict, down which all my free time would be sacrificed in order to hone my (eventually) mad skillz.
That's when I put down the controller and had me a slice of pizza.
Posted by patrick at 04:22 AM | Comments (1)
November 09, 2004
Pirate napkins? And here it isn't even my birthday...
The napkin pictured below, which I discovered at my mom's house today when I went over for lunch, is easily the coolest thing I saw all day. Somebody gave her these pirate napkins, believe it or not. There weren't many left, but I snagged all of 'em.
And this is a link to the coolest thing I saw yesterday...
Posted by patrick at 01:44 AM | Comments (1)
Yukio Mishima and I have a complex relationship...
My love/hate relationship with Yukio Mishima continues.
How does one fall into such a relationship with a man who committed seppuku 34 years ago this month, you ask? Well...
I first became aware of Mishima as an author back in late 2000, during my first year teaching high school English. His short story, "Patriotism," was in the senior fiction/poetry/drama anthology--a story about a young newlywed soldier who commits suicide with his bride in anticipation of the order to go and fight his former comrades, who have staged a local rebellion on behalf of the lost glory of Imperial Japan. It's a great story, provided you don't lose your lunch during Mishima's excruciatingly graphic description of the husband's self-disembowelment, and I included it on the syllabus.
I read a biography of Mishima late last year, and it reaffirmed what I'd already come to suspect: He was a terribly interesting personality, but I don't think I'd actively enjoy spending any appreciable amount of time around him (a la Truman Capote, but less so than with Capote). He seemed to pump his writing full of himself--both with regards to characters and themes that were important to him--and it gets a bit trying.
I knocked out a Mishima novel this summer, "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea," and hated it. Much of the story revolves around a precocious, cynical little boy and his amoral, elitist, kiddie-fascist friends. Thinking that perhaps I should stick to Mishima's short stories, I went out and grabbed "Acts of Worship," a collection.
The first three stories--"Fountains in the Rain," about a young man who fosters an entire relationship with a young woman just so he can experience the thrill of breaking up with somebody; "Raisin Bread," about a bunch of young slackers; and "Sword," about a club of kendo enthusiasts on a training trip--didn't do anything for me. "Sea and Sunset" was interesting enough, revolving as it did around a European who participated in the ill-fated Children's Crusade and ended up in Japan, but it was a concept story rather than character-based, and woefully short. "Cigarette" bugged me at first, as I'd had more than enough of Mishima's fascist schoolboy microcosm, but it ended decently enough. I shouldn't have let up my guard, though; the next story, "Martyrdom," tossed me right back into that same hierarchy, this time with a little sadistic homoeroticism and just-for-kicks murder tossed in for good measure.
By this point last night, I had given up on Mishima. I'm not looking to write off authors, but with all that there is out there in the world to read, it's always valuable to know if you can focus your energies and time elsewhere. With only the substantially longer title piece left unread in "Acts of Worship," I was ready to make the break.
For most of its sixty pages, I held to my guns. The main character was a mousy woman who had dedicated her life to housekeeping for a bland, unfriendly professor of poetry. I wanted to smack him for being an ass, and her for acting so self-effacingly that she makes Katerina's speech at the end of "The Taming of the Shrew" sound like radical feminism by comparison.
And then, right in the last few pages of the story, Mishima made it all better. I won't go into specifics, as I wouldn't want to ruin the story for anybody, but I'll be damned if I didn't get a little choked up. After his boorish, pretentious characters, his "hey, everybody...let me beat the fact that I was a misunderstood youth to death" recurring theme, and his favorite love/sex/death trifecta, he managed to pluck at my heartstrings with only paragraphs to go.
I'd figured I wouldn't be bothering with his tetralogy, but now I guess I'll have to. He's a tricky one, Mishima. Watch me read his entire body of translated work and then get massively pissed off with the last novel I read, when it's too late for me to skip his other stuff on the basis of it. I wouldn't put it past him...
Posted by patrick at 12:36 AM | Comments (3)
November 03, 2004
Bush Taiko Duggars...
I could go on a long, rambling rant about the election, but that's energy I'd be wise to put towards my screenplay draft. Suffice it to say I'm not looking forward to seeing what sort of shenanigans this administration pulls when it knows Bush will be out after this second term, anyway. They have nothing to lose. Would that that were true of the American citizens.
Taiko. The more I do it, the more I love it. My left leg gave me only a few moments of trouble tonight, but if this same improvement curve continues, next Monday's practice should go without a hitch.
The Duggar family--in/famous for their 15 kids--must have been featured on TV, because my search results (what people are entering into search engines that points them toward my site in the first place) are all Duggar-related so far this month. What's more, my journal entry about them has received seven new comments over the last two days. Before that, the most recent comment was from June. Read my original entry, check out the comments, toss in your two cents.
In closing for today, consider hugging at least one glum Democrat each day between now and the re-inauguration in January. We could use it!
Posted by patrick at 10:54 PM | Comments (2)
November 02, 2004
ATTENTION AMERICA: PLEASE PREVENT THIS TODAY!
Posted by patrick at 07:54 AM | Comments (2)