I just thought I should point this out.
Eagle-eyed Threshold readers will notice that the style of this picture (click on the image to view larger) of Lindsay Lohan in the poster for "Herbie: Fully Loaded" bears a remarkable resemblance to this picture of Lindsay that I drew back in September of 2004.
Now, I don't want to start talking litigation, but...
Seriously, though, while the movie looks lame (I was never a big fan of the original "Love Bug" movies), I think that in terms of style it's a very cool image (even though the rest of the poster is lame), and wouldn't be a bit surprised if it were done by artist Adam Hughes (or at least someone familiar with his work).
It's worth noting that the movie was written by actor/comedian Thomas Lennon, who plays Lt. Dangle on Comedy Central's "Reno 911."
Also of note about the movie is the fact that test audiences felt that Lohan looked a bit too busty and was dressed too revealingly, so Disney digitally raised the necklines on her shirts and reduced her breast size by two cups.
Maybe they should have just waited until she got all anorexic and reduced her breast size on her own...
Friday, June 24, 2005
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Is That Like A Really Honest Steak?
Monday night when I got home from the movie, or rather, before I got home, I stopped at the Chinese place across the street to pick up dinner.
I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted, so before I went in I checked out the menu they had posted in the window.
I had a very hard time suppressing my laughter when I saw that one of the beef entrées contained “Frank steak” as an ingredient.
I couldn’t believe that it was actually spelled “Frank” on the menu.
Of course, having actually printed menus up for restaurants at one of my desktop publishing jobs, I know how much of a pain in the ass it can be, particularly when you’re working from copy written by someone who is not a native speaker of the language. You tend to give up on doing things like running spell checks or even reading through it to make sure that it actually makes sense.
So it’s no wonder that things like “Frank steak,” or, our personal favorite at work, from a restaurant we frequent, “shshrimp,” manage to get past the printers.
On the topic of food, today’s crazy Italian chick recipe turned out okay, but wasn’t quite as good as I’d hoped it would be. In terms of appearance it turned out much better than expected, but the flavor was less than spectacular. So it’s definitely not something I’ll be making anytime real…well, ever.
For those of you wondering, my dad continues to do really well. When I talked to him on Father’s Day he said that he didn’t even feel like he'd had an operation. And now his driving restriction is up, so he’s happy about that.
Anyway, that’s definitely going to do it for today. Have a good weekend everybody.
I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted, so before I went in I checked out the menu they had posted in the window.
I had a very hard time suppressing my laughter when I saw that one of the beef entrées contained “Frank steak” as an ingredient.
I couldn’t believe that it was actually spelled “Frank” on the menu.
Of course, having actually printed menus up for restaurants at one of my desktop publishing jobs, I know how much of a pain in the ass it can be, particularly when you’re working from copy written by someone who is not a native speaker of the language. You tend to give up on doing things like running spell checks or even reading through it to make sure that it actually makes sense.
So it’s no wonder that things like “Frank steak,” or, our personal favorite at work, from a restaurant we frequent, “shshrimp,” manage to get past the printers.
On the topic of food, today’s crazy Italian chick recipe turned out okay, but wasn’t quite as good as I’d hoped it would be. In terms of appearance it turned out much better than expected, but the flavor was less than spectacular. So it’s definitely not something I’ll be making anytime real…well, ever.
For those of you wondering, my dad continues to do really well. When I talked to him on Father’s Day he said that he didn’t even feel like he'd had an operation. And now his driving restriction is up, so he’s happy about that.
Anyway, that’s definitely going to do it for today. Have a good weekend everybody.
"Nobody Wants To Be An Amputee"
This is pretty cool:
Bionic Arm Brings Back Sense of Touch
The title of this entry comes from the guy making use of the arm, and sums things up pretty accurately.
As a condition of his use of the bionic arm, I think he should be forced to wear a red track suit.
Bionic Arm Brings Back Sense of Touch
The title of this entry comes from the guy making use of the arm, and sums things up pretty accurately.
As a condition of his use of the bionic arm, I think he should be forced to wear a red track suit.
Rolling Out The D'oh!
I’ve come to the conclusion that if I never have to deal with dough again it will be way too fucking soon.
Today’s cooking experiment was a recipe I got from Giada, the crazy/hot Italian chick on Food Network. When I watched the episode in which she made it, despite the fact that in addition to being more than a little aroused by her I’m also a little bit scared of he, due to whatever it is about her that projects an image of not being quite right in the head, I managed to notice that what she was making looked really damned good.
It was also a recipe that, while somewhat challenging (mostly in that it would be somewhat time-consuming), would allow me to make use of one of the springform pans I’d bought a while back to make the cheesecake for that chick from my Negotiation class.
(At dinner last night Kathleen mentioned that at work that day she’d bumped into the woman I made the cheesecake for, and she informed me that she still looks good. Not terribly exciting or important, I know, but I just thought it was worth mentioning.)
So in addition to thinking that it looked like it would be good, I was pleased to see an opportunity to use one of the pans without having to resort to making cheesecake.
Still, I was a little wary, as it did involve messing with dough for the crust, but the recipe called for using ready-made pastry crusts. All I would need to do was roll them out. How hard could that be?
…
Now that the damn thing is in the oven and (most of) the flour I’d put on the counter for rolling out the crusts is cleaned up after it somehow managed to spread itself all over my kitchen, I can tell you that it was a pain in the ass.
The ready-made crusts came folded, and after I unfolded the first one I started to roll it out to fit the pan it began to separate along the folds, splitting it into three separate pieces.
Undaunted, but a little annoyed, I simply pressed the pieces together into a big lump of dough and started rolling.
And rolling.
And rolling.
The goal was to roll it out into a 13 ½ inch square.
My crust looked to have taken on some sort of fractal pattern, but somewhere in the whorls and spikes there was a 13 ½ by 13 ½ square, so I laid it over the springform pan and began spooning the filling over it, causing it to sink into the pan, which was the approach I decided to take, as there didn’t seem to be any other way to get the crust into the pan and still leave some of it hanging over the edges.
Of course, much of it didn’t hang over the edges anyway, so once I rolled out the other crust (which, by the way, to be infuriating, rolled out perfectly and without any sort of mishaps) I was forced to push it inside the pan to join it with the other crust, so the top of the crust will not overlap the edges of the pan as it was intended to, or will it have the “decorative border” called for in the recipe.
Unless you consider “angrily mashed together” to be a decorative style.
Still, it does smell good, and I’m sure that, appearances aside, it’ll taste just fine, but at this rate I’m going to get as much use out of those springform pans as I will out of that package of condoms I bought God knows how long ago…
So now that the schools are closed I find that I have more company on the trails when I go walking. Not too much, though, as most kids remain holed up inside playing video games or watching the MTV, or whatever it is the kids do these days.
(Yes, I was being ironic when I said “the MTV”)
It also means that the various community pools are open, one of which I walk past on my regular route.
Usually there are swimming lessons going on whenever I walk by, so I’ll spare a glance to see if there are any cute swimming instructors. Usually there aren’t, as they tend to be mail, and even if there were I wouldn’t be able to get a very good look, as there are some trees in the way, and I realize that it wouldn’t be a good idea for some strange guy to be walking by every morning and staring intently in the general direction of young children in swimming suits…
In contrast to a normal week I was positively a social butterfly this week. Monday I went to a movie with Scott, Tuesday I had lunch with Kathleen, and last night I had dinner with Kathleen and Brian.
I guess it was nice to be so uncharacteristically social, though it would have been nicer if any one of the people I was social with had been a single hot chick.
(Note that I qualified that with “single” so that Kathleen has no basis to yell at me for saying that I don’t think she’s hot, or, alternatively, saying that I do, as she’s already excluded from consideration before we even get to the hot part)
Honestly, though, it wouldn’t have done me any good for them to be single hot chicks, as odds are I’d still only be spending time with them as “friends,” or if they had been dates I would have inevitably done whatever it is that I do that pretty much prevents me from getting beyond the first couple of dates.
So it was probably just as well that I spent my time with my shaven-headed, bearded boss, Kathleen (whom I’ll continue avoiding opening a can of worms with by not describing her), and her fine-ass husband…oh, wait, ignore that last part.
I have now taken today’s crazy Italian chick-inspired meal out of the oven. It looks okay in the pan, but we’ll see how the sides look once I remove the pan.
Maybe it didn’t turn out as well as hers did because I’m not dressed up as nicely as she is when she cooks, or because I’m not constantly smiling.
Often there’s some sort of set-up on her show. Friends are coming over for dinner, to watch the big game, or to go on a picnic, or whatever, and so it falls to her to feed them all. Usually what she’ll do is pick some sort of standard American fare and Italian it up by drawing on some recipe she encountered while traveling in Italy or that her mother taught her when she was just a little crazy chick.
On the show I watched yesterday, though, I found it kind of interesting that the friends she was having over for dinner were all male. And there were like five of them.
In any case, now that my attempt is finished I think I’ll cut it loose from the pan and see how it turned out.
I may be back later, but if not, have a good weekend.
Today’s cooking experiment was a recipe I got from Giada, the crazy/hot Italian chick on Food Network. When I watched the episode in which she made it, despite the fact that in addition to being more than a little aroused by her I’m also a little bit scared of he, due to whatever it is about her that projects an image of not being quite right in the head, I managed to notice that what she was making looked really damned good.
It was also a recipe that, while somewhat challenging (mostly in that it would be somewhat time-consuming), would allow me to make use of one of the springform pans I’d bought a while back to make the cheesecake for that chick from my Negotiation class.
(At dinner last night Kathleen mentioned that at work that day she’d bumped into the woman I made the cheesecake for, and she informed me that she still looks good. Not terribly exciting or important, I know, but I just thought it was worth mentioning.)
So in addition to thinking that it looked like it would be good, I was pleased to see an opportunity to use one of the pans without having to resort to making cheesecake.
Still, I was a little wary, as it did involve messing with dough for the crust, but the recipe called for using ready-made pastry crusts. All I would need to do was roll them out. How hard could that be?
…
Now that the damn thing is in the oven and (most of) the flour I’d put on the counter for rolling out the crusts is cleaned up after it somehow managed to spread itself all over my kitchen, I can tell you that it was a pain in the ass.
The ready-made crusts came folded, and after I unfolded the first one I started to roll it out to fit the pan it began to separate along the folds, splitting it into three separate pieces.
Undaunted, but a little annoyed, I simply pressed the pieces together into a big lump of dough and started rolling.
And rolling.
And rolling.
The goal was to roll it out into a 13 ½ inch square.
My crust looked to have taken on some sort of fractal pattern, but somewhere in the whorls and spikes there was a 13 ½ by 13 ½ square, so I laid it over the springform pan and began spooning the filling over it, causing it to sink into the pan, which was the approach I decided to take, as there didn’t seem to be any other way to get the crust into the pan and still leave some of it hanging over the edges.
Of course, much of it didn’t hang over the edges anyway, so once I rolled out the other crust (which, by the way, to be infuriating, rolled out perfectly and without any sort of mishaps) I was forced to push it inside the pan to join it with the other crust, so the top of the crust will not overlap the edges of the pan as it was intended to, or will it have the “decorative border” called for in the recipe.
Unless you consider “angrily mashed together” to be a decorative style.
Still, it does smell good, and I’m sure that, appearances aside, it’ll taste just fine, but at this rate I’m going to get as much use out of those springform pans as I will out of that package of condoms I bought God knows how long ago…
So now that the schools are closed I find that I have more company on the trails when I go walking. Not too much, though, as most kids remain holed up inside playing video games or watching the MTV, or whatever it is the kids do these days.
(Yes, I was being ironic when I said “the MTV”)
It also means that the various community pools are open, one of which I walk past on my regular route.
Usually there are swimming lessons going on whenever I walk by, so I’ll spare a glance to see if there are any cute swimming instructors. Usually there aren’t, as they tend to be mail, and even if there were I wouldn’t be able to get a very good look, as there are some trees in the way, and I realize that it wouldn’t be a good idea for some strange guy to be walking by every morning and staring intently in the general direction of young children in swimming suits…
In contrast to a normal week I was positively a social butterfly this week. Monday I went to a movie with Scott, Tuesday I had lunch with Kathleen, and last night I had dinner with Kathleen and Brian.
I guess it was nice to be so uncharacteristically social, though it would have been nicer if any one of the people I was social with had been a single hot chick.
(Note that I qualified that with “single” so that Kathleen has no basis to yell at me for saying that I don’t think she’s hot, or, alternatively, saying that I do, as she’s already excluded from consideration before we even get to the hot part)
Honestly, though, it wouldn’t have done me any good for them to be single hot chicks, as odds are I’d still only be spending time with them as “friends,” or if they had been dates I would have inevitably done whatever it is that I do that pretty much prevents me from getting beyond the first couple of dates.
So it was probably just as well that I spent my time with my shaven-headed, bearded boss, Kathleen (whom I’ll continue avoiding opening a can of worms with by not describing her), and her fine-ass husband…oh, wait, ignore that last part.
I have now taken today’s crazy Italian chick-inspired meal out of the oven. It looks okay in the pan, but we’ll see how the sides look once I remove the pan.
Maybe it didn’t turn out as well as hers did because I’m not dressed up as nicely as she is when she cooks, or because I’m not constantly smiling.
Often there’s some sort of set-up on her show. Friends are coming over for dinner, to watch the big game, or to go on a picnic, or whatever, and so it falls to her to feed them all. Usually what she’ll do is pick some sort of standard American fare and Italian it up by drawing on some recipe she encountered while traveling in Italy or that her mother taught her when she was just a little crazy chick.
On the show I watched yesterday, though, I found it kind of interesting that the friends she was having over for dinner were all male. And there were like five of them.
In any case, now that my attempt is finished I think I’ll cut it loose from the pan and see how it turned out.
I may be back later, but if not, have a good weekend.
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
What A Strange Place My Mind Is or What's The Deal With 1989?
Today’s class was largely uneventful, but informative. I’m pretty sure, after having a brief lesson in how it works in class today, that I will take the actual CSS class when it’s offered in August. Now that I have a pretty good handle on HTML, CSS would be an extremely valuable skill to pick up, particularly in conjunction with the XML skills I’ll be picking up next month.
My lunch was pretty boring, as I was stuck in a busy and crowded cafeteria by myself, eating my default HQ lunch of pizza.
It’s my default lunch, as they always have pizza available, and typically I don’t like any of the actual meals they have available. Yesterday I had gotten something other than pizza (some kind of pasta dish) and had been extremely disappointed, so today I opted not to be adventurous.
After I finished eating I went outside, found a table that wasn’t too wet after the brief shower we’d had, and sat down to read for the rest of my lunch hour.
It was exactly as exciting as it sounds.
After that it was back to class for the rest of the afternoon.
One of the women in the class was just a brick.
Not physically, but mentally. She kept screwing up the simplest exercises, and just demonstrated and overall lack of competence. It annoys me when I encounter people like that in training classes. I mean, like me (and most professionals in NoVA), these people work for a technology company, so it’s confusing, and a little disheartening, when my fellow employees seem utterly baffled by even the most basic aspects of technology.
I don’t care what your function is, when you work for a company like mine in any capacity, you should have a greater level of expertise than simply being able to point and click (and at the very least, you should have that much expertise).
What’s really scary is that this woman is probably a project manager or something.
On my way home I stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things, as it had been my intention to try a couple of the recipes I’ve picked up from watching Giada “Crazy (but hot) Italian Chick” de Laurentis on “Everyday Italian.”
Today I was going to try a simple pasta dish, and tomorrow I was going to make a slightly more complicated pasta dish (An Italian cooking show with pasta recipes? What are the odds?).
However, once I got home and had put everything away and begun getting my workspace ready to prepare the meal, I finally thought to turn my cell phone back on, at which point, much to my surprise, I found that I had two voicemail messages.
The first was Kathleen, hoping to catch me as I left class in order to while away her drive home by talking to me, which she would have, if I’d had my phone turned on.
The second was also Kathleen, this time telling me that she and Brian were somewhere in Ashburn waiting for an Indian restaurant to open and that I could meet them there if I wanted.
As this message had only come in a few minutes earlier, and the restaurant still wasn’t open, I figured I’d scrap my plans for cooking and meet them. Based on her message, I wasn’t sure where she was, so I tried calling her back and got her voicemail.
I tried calling Brian, but got some weird message that indicated that he was out of range, so I then tried figuring out what shopping plaza she was talking about when explaining where the restaurant was.
I couldn’t track it down, so I tried her again, and once again got voicemail. I tried Brian again and this time got a hold of him. When he described the plaza, I figured out where they were, so I was on my way.
Along the way, though, I got a bit less sure about where he’d said they were, and decided that it was someplace other than where I thought. I went there and found that it wasn’t the place and decided that it was, in fact, where I’d originally thought it was, and eventually I made it there.
I haven’t eaten much Indian food, so it took me a while to decide on what to get. Ultimately I went with “Butter Chicken.” It was very good, but I’m not certain how butter factored into it.
When we left, Brian was going to swing by my apartment to pick something up, though he wasn’t really sure of how to get there. While this was a part of Ashburn I seldom have occasion to spend time in (Ashburn is pretty well spread out), I did know how to get home from there…or so I thought.
Basically, Kathleen had told me that one road could take me almost all of the way home, so, rather than taking the reverse of the route that had brought me there, I decided to try to take this other route, which I eventually discovered wasn’t an option due to construction, so I turned around and went back the way I’d come.
In the meantime, apparently, Brian had gotten lost, and Kathleen, who was driving her own car, decided that it would be easier for her to just swing by my place than to try to figure out where Brian was and explain to him how to get to my place from there.
Of course, thanks to the delay in my own trip home, Kathleen ended up waiting for me outside my building for several minutes wondering if perhaps Brian and I were lost in the same place…
This morning I’d woken up, rolled over, saw that it was only 6:48, said, “Screw that,” and rolled over and went back to sleep.
After what seemed like only a few seconds I found myself saying, “Dammit Sarah,” as my alarm clock began playing the Sarah McLachlan CD.
It’s not the first time I’ve found myself getting annoyed at Sarah for waking me up, though I’m accustomed to having it happen several hours earlier in the day.
A few days ago she really annoyed me by waking me up from an interesting, but extremely odd, dream. There was a certain irony involved in the fact that Sarah had woken me from the dream, considering that it was her that I had been dreaming about.
As mentioned, it was a very strange dream.
It started out in 1989 at Houghton High School, where Judas Priest was putting on a concert to promote unity between Houghton and Hancock.
For non-Yoopers, which is to say most of the population of the world, Houghton and Hancock are two “cities” in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan separated by a canal, but connected by a bridge that spans the canal.
There is a certain amount of rivalry between the two, but I really don’t think that the level of acrimony is so high that an iconic British heavy metal band would need to perform a concert for the purposes of bringing them together in the spirit of brotherhood.
Still, it was quite a performance.
Not that I knew this personally. Not being from Houghton or Hancock, I wasn’t allowed to attend the concert, which, despite being organized in the spirit of unity between the two cities nevertheless fostered an attitude of exclusivity and isolationism when it came to people from other places.
However, the performance had recently been released on DVD, and as my dream shifted its focus I found that I had only been watching the DVD and was not actually at the concert, and, in fact, I was back home in Michigan going for a walk with my parents and telling them about one particularly compelling segment of the concert video I had seen in which lead singer Rob Halford led the Houghton-Hancock audience in a sing-along to one of Priest’s many classics.
(While at this point it should be obvious, I will mention that my mind, particularly the subconscious portion of it, is a very strange place.)
As my parents and I were walking alongside the road in this place that was very much like home in terms of the basic layout, though it seemed to have been on a much larger scale, stretching on for miles and miles beyond its actual real-world limits, a car pulled up.
Specifically, it was my car, or rather, my old car, one that I haven’t even seen in years (A 1989 Mazda MX-6, for those of you who are curious. Hmm…odd that “1989” keeps figuring into this dream.), let alone owned, though in the dream, despite the fact that it was, apparently, taking place in the present, and I wasn’t driving it, I still owned it.
The person driving it was none other than Sarah herself, though I have no idea how she had gotten my car, who, after pulling in front of us and coming to a quick stop, rolled the window down and beckoned me to get in.
I say “beckoned” because that’s what she did. There was a definite air of seduction about the way she summoned me. So it was a beckoning.
Sometimes I’m an idiot even in my dreams, and so I stood there, motionless, not certain what my next move should be(!) until finaly my mother shoved me toward the car and said, “What are you waiting for? I thought you loved her.”
I nodded that this was true, but, and I think understandably so, under the circumstances, I was a bit nervous, though nervous or not, I wasn’t enough of an idiot to pass this up.
And so, on trembling legs, I began walking toward the car, Sarah smilingly seductively all the while, and as I watched her I found myself feeling rather like a Christian about to step into the arena with the lions…but in a good way.
She began to sing as I opened the door and got in, and that’s when I realized that the singing was coming from outside of my dream, and I found myself more annoyed at Sarah than I’d ever been on any other morning.
I was even more annoyed than I had been at her when I found that she’d changed the words to her song “World on Fire” and added vocals from Robbie Robertson for a version of the song that’s included on the soundtrack to that Steven Spielberg show on TNT,“Into the West.”
I suppose that it’s her song to do with what she will, but I’m especially fond of the regular version of it, so it bothered me to hear it modified.
I haven’t actually watched the show, despite the fact that my beloved Rachael Leigh Cook is featured in it. Mmmm…Rachael Leigh Cook….
The apartment next to mine is a “showcase” apartment, which means that it remains unoccupied so that the leasing office can show it to prospective tenants.
Last week I overheard the Property Manager showing the apartment to someone, so I took a look out the peephole to see if she was showing the apartment to a cute chick. She wasn’t; it was, as usual, a guy.
Still, I did note that the Property Manager (Who is herself fairly cute, if oddly monochromatic. Her hair, skin, and eyes are all the same shade of light brown, as she apparently spends the whole year visiting a tanning salon. The overall effect is that she looks sort of like a sepia-tone photograph.) pointed up to indicate the apartment above mine and said, “That would be the actual apartment you’d be moving in to.”
So it seemed that the “Human Wrecking Ball” and her yipping little dog would soon be leaving.
That was confirmed just a little while ago when I was hauling my garbage out and a moving truck pulled up in front of my building, and when I looked up on my way back from the dumpster I could see a bunch of boxes piled up by the window in the apartment above mine.
Hopefully whoever takes her place won’t have an annoying dog and won’t shake the whole damn building whenever he or she walks.
On the topic of my apartment complex, I got a letter the other day informing me that if I renew my lease I will have to provide proof of renter’s insurance.
That’s actually a good thing, I guess, and getting renter’s insurance is one of those things that I’ve been meaning to do for a while, so this will finally give me the impetus to do it…assuming I renew my lease here.
In any case, it’s almost time for “The Inside,” so I think that will do it for this entry.
My lunch was pretty boring, as I was stuck in a busy and crowded cafeteria by myself, eating my default HQ lunch of pizza.
It’s my default lunch, as they always have pizza available, and typically I don’t like any of the actual meals they have available. Yesterday I had gotten something other than pizza (some kind of pasta dish) and had been extremely disappointed, so today I opted not to be adventurous.
After I finished eating I went outside, found a table that wasn’t too wet after the brief shower we’d had, and sat down to read for the rest of my lunch hour.
It was exactly as exciting as it sounds.
After that it was back to class for the rest of the afternoon.
One of the women in the class was just a brick.
Not physically, but mentally. She kept screwing up the simplest exercises, and just demonstrated and overall lack of competence. It annoys me when I encounter people like that in training classes. I mean, like me (and most professionals in NoVA), these people work for a technology company, so it’s confusing, and a little disheartening, when my fellow employees seem utterly baffled by even the most basic aspects of technology.
I don’t care what your function is, when you work for a company like mine in any capacity, you should have a greater level of expertise than simply being able to point and click (and at the very least, you should have that much expertise).
What’s really scary is that this woman is probably a project manager or something.
On my way home I stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things, as it had been my intention to try a couple of the recipes I’ve picked up from watching Giada “Crazy (but hot) Italian Chick” de Laurentis on “Everyday Italian.”
Today I was going to try a simple pasta dish, and tomorrow I was going to make a slightly more complicated pasta dish (An Italian cooking show with pasta recipes? What are the odds?).
However, once I got home and had put everything away and begun getting my workspace ready to prepare the meal, I finally thought to turn my cell phone back on, at which point, much to my surprise, I found that I had two voicemail messages.
The first was Kathleen, hoping to catch me as I left class in order to while away her drive home by talking to me, which she would have, if I’d had my phone turned on.
The second was also Kathleen, this time telling me that she and Brian were somewhere in Ashburn waiting for an Indian restaurant to open and that I could meet them there if I wanted.
As this message had only come in a few minutes earlier, and the restaurant still wasn’t open, I figured I’d scrap my plans for cooking and meet them. Based on her message, I wasn’t sure where she was, so I tried calling her back and got her voicemail.
I tried calling Brian, but got some weird message that indicated that he was out of range, so I then tried figuring out what shopping plaza she was talking about when explaining where the restaurant was.
I couldn’t track it down, so I tried her again, and once again got voicemail. I tried Brian again and this time got a hold of him. When he described the plaza, I figured out where they were, so I was on my way.
Along the way, though, I got a bit less sure about where he’d said they were, and decided that it was someplace other than where I thought. I went there and found that it wasn’t the place and decided that it was, in fact, where I’d originally thought it was, and eventually I made it there.
I haven’t eaten much Indian food, so it took me a while to decide on what to get. Ultimately I went with “Butter Chicken.” It was very good, but I’m not certain how butter factored into it.
When we left, Brian was going to swing by my apartment to pick something up, though he wasn’t really sure of how to get there. While this was a part of Ashburn I seldom have occasion to spend time in (Ashburn is pretty well spread out), I did know how to get home from there…or so I thought.
Basically, Kathleen had told me that one road could take me almost all of the way home, so, rather than taking the reverse of the route that had brought me there, I decided to try to take this other route, which I eventually discovered wasn’t an option due to construction, so I turned around and went back the way I’d come.
In the meantime, apparently, Brian had gotten lost, and Kathleen, who was driving her own car, decided that it would be easier for her to just swing by my place than to try to figure out where Brian was and explain to him how to get to my place from there.
Of course, thanks to the delay in my own trip home, Kathleen ended up waiting for me outside my building for several minutes wondering if perhaps Brian and I were lost in the same place…
This morning I’d woken up, rolled over, saw that it was only 6:48, said, “Screw that,” and rolled over and went back to sleep.
After what seemed like only a few seconds I found myself saying, “Dammit Sarah,” as my alarm clock began playing the Sarah McLachlan CD.
It’s not the first time I’ve found myself getting annoyed at Sarah for waking me up, though I’m accustomed to having it happen several hours earlier in the day.
A few days ago she really annoyed me by waking me up from an interesting, but extremely odd, dream. There was a certain irony involved in the fact that Sarah had woken me from the dream, considering that it was her that I had been dreaming about.
As mentioned, it was a very strange dream.
It started out in 1989 at Houghton High School, where Judas Priest was putting on a concert to promote unity between Houghton and Hancock.
For non-Yoopers, which is to say most of the population of the world, Houghton and Hancock are two “cities” in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan separated by a canal, but connected by a bridge that spans the canal.
There is a certain amount of rivalry between the two, but I really don’t think that the level of acrimony is so high that an iconic British heavy metal band would need to perform a concert for the purposes of bringing them together in the spirit of brotherhood.
Still, it was quite a performance.
Not that I knew this personally. Not being from Houghton or Hancock, I wasn’t allowed to attend the concert, which, despite being organized in the spirit of unity between the two cities nevertheless fostered an attitude of exclusivity and isolationism when it came to people from other places.
However, the performance had recently been released on DVD, and as my dream shifted its focus I found that I had only been watching the DVD and was not actually at the concert, and, in fact, I was back home in Michigan going for a walk with my parents and telling them about one particularly compelling segment of the concert video I had seen in which lead singer Rob Halford led the Houghton-Hancock audience in a sing-along to one of Priest’s many classics.
(While at this point it should be obvious, I will mention that my mind, particularly the subconscious portion of it, is a very strange place.)
As my parents and I were walking alongside the road in this place that was very much like home in terms of the basic layout, though it seemed to have been on a much larger scale, stretching on for miles and miles beyond its actual real-world limits, a car pulled up.
Specifically, it was my car, or rather, my old car, one that I haven’t even seen in years (A 1989 Mazda MX-6, for those of you who are curious. Hmm…odd that “1989” keeps figuring into this dream.), let alone owned, though in the dream, despite the fact that it was, apparently, taking place in the present, and I wasn’t driving it, I still owned it.
The person driving it was none other than Sarah herself, though I have no idea how she had gotten my car, who, after pulling in front of us and coming to a quick stop, rolled the window down and beckoned me to get in.
I say “beckoned” because that’s what she did. There was a definite air of seduction about the way she summoned me. So it was a beckoning.
Sometimes I’m an idiot even in my dreams, and so I stood there, motionless, not certain what my next move should be(!) until finaly my mother shoved me toward the car and said, “What are you waiting for? I thought you loved her.”
I nodded that this was true, but, and I think understandably so, under the circumstances, I was a bit nervous, though nervous or not, I wasn’t enough of an idiot to pass this up.
And so, on trembling legs, I began walking toward the car, Sarah smilingly seductively all the while, and as I watched her I found myself feeling rather like a Christian about to step into the arena with the lions…but in a good way.
She began to sing as I opened the door and got in, and that’s when I realized that the singing was coming from outside of my dream, and I found myself more annoyed at Sarah than I’d ever been on any other morning.
I was even more annoyed than I had been at her when I found that she’d changed the words to her song “World on Fire” and added vocals from Robbie Robertson for a version of the song that’s included on the soundtrack to that Steven Spielberg show on TNT,“Into the West.”
I suppose that it’s her song to do with what she will, but I’m especially fond of the regular version of it, so it bothered me to hear it modified.
I haven’t actually watched the show, despite the fact that my beloved Rachael Leigh Cook is featured in it. Mmmm…Rachael Leigh Cook….
The apartment next to mine is a “showcase” apartment, which means that it remains unoccupied so that the leasing office can show it to prospective tenants.
Last week I overheard the Property Manager showing the apartment to someone, so I took a look out the peephole to see if she was showing the apartment to a cute chick. She wasn’t; it was, as usual, a guy.
Still, I did note that the Property Manager (Who is herself fairly cute, if oddly monochromatic. Her hair, skin, and eyes are all the same shade of light brown, as she apparently spends the whole year visiting a tanning salon. The overall effect is that she looks sort of like a sepia-tone photograph.) pointed up to indicate the apartment above mine and said, “That would be the actual apartment you’d be moving in to.”
So it seemed that the “Human Wrecking Ball” and her yipping little dog would soon be leaving.
That was confirmed just a little while ago when I was hauling my garbage out and a moving truck pulled up in front of my building, and when I looked up on my way back from the dumpster I could see a bunch of boxes piled up by the window in the apartment above mine.
Hopefully whoever takes her place won’t have an annoying dog and won’t shake the whole damn building whenever he or she walks.
On the topic of my apartment complex, I got a letter the other day informing me that if I renew my lease I will have to provide proof of renter’s insurance.
That’s actually a good thing, I guess, and getting renter’s insurance is one of those things that I’ve been meaning to do for a while, so this will finally give me the impetus to do it…assuming I renew my lease here.
In any case, it’s almost time for “The Inside,” so I think that will do it for this entry.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Better Than Usual Odds, Not So Ignorant As I Thought, Powerless To Look Away, And Other Odds Still Suck
So I woke up at a bit after 7:00 this morning. Even though my class didn’t start until 9:00 I figured I might as well get up.
After all, from what I’ve seen, traffic is extremely bad between 7:00 and noon, so even though HQ is only a few miles down the road it could take upwards of a half an hour to get there, so I figured if I took my time getting ready and left by about 7:45 I’d be able to get there in time to get a decent parking space and to take advantage of a free breakfast being offered by the Chevy Chase Bank branch inside of HQ.
Though there was an inordinate amount of unmoving traffic, it only took me about twenty minutes to get there, so I had a lot of time to kill, and not much to do in order to kill it, so basically I just wandered around HQ for about twenty minutes, grabbed some fruit and a Danish once the bank opened up, then went outside to eat them. I took my time with this, so by the time I washed the stickiness of the Danish off my hands it was a reasonable time to walk into the class and find a seat.
When I got there only one other person (a woman, and a fairly hot one at that, whom I’d seen upstairs getting herself a free breakfast) in the room besides the instructor.
For his part, the instructor said, “You must be Jon,” and came over to introduce himself, which left me a little puzzled. Sure, I was wearing my badge, which has my name on it, but given the distance, and the fact that it had problem been entirely out of his field of vision when I’d walked in, it seemed unlikely that he’d read my name off of it.
Choosing not to delight in my puzzlement, the instructor explained that he was able to deduce my name based on the fact that I was the only male taking the class.
This fact, naturally, intrigued me.
Of course, shortly before the class started another guy, whose name hadn’t been on the old roster the instructor was working from came in. Still, that left me with a 7:2 female to male ratio, which could be considered decent odds.
Once the rest of the class filtered in, though, the odds dropped. Besides the aforementioned fairly hot chick (married) there was a not quite as hot chick and a not really very hot chick, while the remainder weren’t hot at all.
I never successfully completed a ring check on the two semi-hot chicks, though I imagine that at the very least they have boyfriends, since my experience has taught me that basically that’s just how life is.
As for the class itself, it was pretty good. Very straightforward.
Honestly, I was surprised to find just how much of it wasn’t at all new to me.
Apparently over the past decade, as I’ve looked at the source code of various sites and made a few manual tweaks here and there with HTML files I’ve worked on, I actually picked up a lot more knowledge than I ever realized.
Tomorrow, though, will most likely be entirely new to me, so that’ll be good.
I decided during the class that in addition to taking the XML class next month I’ll probably sign up for the CSS class as well.
(For any non-technical people reading this, it doesn’t really matter what XML or CSS are, so I won’t bother explaining them. If you’re really curious, you can always Google them on your own and find out.)
On my lunch break I met up with Kathleen (Who was on my voice mail yelling at me for not answering my phone when I got out of the movie yesterday, as she’d called to pass the time on her boring drive home from work and was annoyed at me for not answering. The funny thing is that, knowing that I so seldom get calls, I nearly left my cell phone on in the theater, but ultimately decided to shut it off.).
Unfortunately that won’t be an option tomorrow, as she’ll be in a meeting all day, so I’ll be left to fend for myself for an hour.
As I’ve mentioned many times in the past, there is an awful lot of eye candy at HQ (though most of them don’t seem to take training classes). In fact, I should probably apologize to Kathleen for the way my eyes kept drifting away in the middle of our conversations every time a hot chick walked by.
But naturally the fact that there are all of these hot chicks doesn’t do me much good. After all, a busy cafeteria at the corporate headquarters of the company I work for isn’t exactly a singles bar, so despite the fact that there are a lot of them it’s not an ideal place to meet chicks.
Beyond questions of propriety and acceptable conduct in a work environment, though, there are two other major issues. One of them is that I work in a different location entirely several miles away, and the other is that, at that other location, I work a schedule that is basically the exact opposite of the one that anyone at HQ is likely to work.
Because of this my approach would have to be one of just randomly walking up to someone in the cafeteria and immediately ask her out, as the two facts mentioned above would prevent me from being able to establish any sort of connection over time.
Putting aside the question of how well women respond to a total stranger just walking up to them and asking them out (which I can’t believe that, in general, they’d respond well to at all), we end up back at the matter of propriety and acceptable business behaviors.
Anyway, to get mostly off this topic, but to stick to the “hot chick” portion, last week I mentioned that I stumbled across a show on Food Network called “Everyday Italian.”
The star of the show is an extremely hot Italian-American woman, who, as I mentioned, sort of bugs me.
I had concluded that it was the fact that her “spokesmodel” style smile, which seems sort of odd of place and never goes away, coupled with a sort of crazed intensity in her eyes makes her look, well, sort of fucked in the head.
Beyond that, though, she wears these fairly glamorous clothes while she’s cooking, which also seem out of place. Also, whenever she’s just talking she sounds like your average American…until she says something like “mozzarella” or “spaghetti,” at which point she places an extreme emphasis on the words and tries way too hard to sound Italian.
With a name like Giada de Laurentis (and that nose), there’s no question that she’s authentically Italian (or rather, Italian-American), but when she tries to sound Italian, it sounds phony.
And irritating.
Still, as mentioned, she is hot, and she does cook some interesting meals, so despite the fact that all of these other things make her seem a little crazy and make me a little uneasy, or perhaps because of that uneasiness, I find that I’m powerless to look away.
So far everyday I’ve set her show to record on the DVR, and I sit and watch it in a confusing state of interest, irritation, annoyance, agitation, and mild arousal.
When I was leaving from the class today, as I do every time I leave from HQ, I found myself stuck for an extended period of time behind a long line of cars waiting for my chance to turn left.
I couldn’t help but think, “WTF?” I mean, it would be one thing if this happened once in a while, but this happens invariably.
Just every so often couldn’t I drive out to find no cars ahead of me, and/or a green light? I mean, statistically, shouldn’t that happen every so often?
But no, instead I continualy find myself stuck for ten minutes, and it’s not even like it’s just a couple of cars, or like it’s even just cars. Today there was a dump truck, a cement truck, a semi, and some sort of beat-up old van towing a huge trailer with what looked to be some sort of doomsday device being hauled in it.
Still, I did eventually make my way home, and it’s not like I really had anything to rush home for (other than to watch the crazy Italian chick), but even so, it’d be nice to catch a break every now and then.
Ah well.
In any case, there are a few things I want to do, so I guess that will do it for this entry (In which, you will note, I made use of some crazy HTML skillz, beeyotch!).
After all, from what I’ve seen, traffic is extremely bad between 7:00 and noon, so even though HQ is only a few miles down the road it could take upwards of a half an hour to get there, so I figured if I took my time getting ready and left by about 7:45 I’d be able to get there in time to get a decent parking space and to take advantage of a free breakfast being offered by the Chevy Chase Bank branch inside of HQ.
Though there was an inordinate amount of unmoving traffic, it only took me about twenty minutes to get there, so I had a lot of time to kill, and not much to do in order to kill it, so basically I just wandered around HQ for about twenty minutes, grabbed some fruit and a Danish once the bank opened up, then went outside to eat them. I took my time with this, so by the time I washed the stickiness of the Danish off my hands it was a reasonable time to walk into the class and find a seat.
When I got there only one other person (a woman, and a fairly hot one at that, whom I’d seen upstairs getting herself a free breakfast) in the room besides the instructor.
For his part, the instructor said, “You must be Jon,” and came over to introduce himself, which left me a little puzzled. Sure, I was wearing my badge, which has my name on it, but given the distance, and the fact that it had problem been entirely out of his field of vision when I’d walked in, it seemed unlikely that he’d read my name off of it.
Choosing not to delight in my puzzlement, the instructor explained that he was able to deduce my name based on the fact that I was the only male taking the class.
This fact, naturally, intrigued me.
Of course, shortly before the class started another guy, whose name hadn’t been on the old roster the instructor was working from came in. Still, that left me with a 7:2 female to male ratio, which could be considered decent odds.
Once the rest of the class filtered in, though, the odds dropped. Besides the aforementioned fairly hot chick (married) there was a not quite as hot chick and a not really very hot chick, while the remainder weren’t hot at all.
I never successfully completed a ring check on the two semi-hot chicks, though I imagine that at the very least they have boyfriends, since my experience has taught me that basically that’s just how life is.
As for the class itself, it was pretty good. Very straightforward.
Honestly, I was surprised to find just how much of it wasn’t at all new to me.
Apparently over the past decade, as I’ve looked at the source code of various sites and made a few manual tweaks here and there with HTML files I’ve worked on, I actually picked up a lot more knowledge than I ever realized.
Tomorrow, though, will most likely be entirely new to me, so that’ll be good.
I decided during the class that in addition to taking the XML class next month I’ll probably sign up for the CSS class as well.
(For any non-technical people reading this, it doesn’t really matter what XML or CSS are, so I won’t bother explaining them. If you’re really curious, you can always Google them on your own and find out.)
On my lunch break I met up with Kathleen (Who was on my voice mail yelling at me for not answering my phone when I got out of the movie yesterday, as she’d called to pass the time on her boring drive home from work and was annoyed at me for not answering. The funny thing is that, knowing that I so seldom get calls, I nearly left my cell phone on in the theater, but ultimately decided to shut it off.).
Unfortunately that won’t be an option tomorrow, as she’ll be in a meeting all day, so I’ll be left to fend for myself for an hour.
As I’ve mentioned many times in the past, there is an awful lot of eye candy at HQ (though most of them don’t seem to take training classes). In fact, I should probably apologize to Kathleen for the way my eyes kept drifting away in the middle of our conversations every time a hot chick walked by.
But naturally the fact that there are all of these hot chicks doesn’t do me much good. After all, a busy cafeteria at the corporate headquarters of the company I work for isn’t exactly a singles bar, so despite the fact that there are a lot of them it’s not an ideal place to meet chicks.
Beyond questions of propriety and acceptable conduct in a work environment, though, there are two other major issues. One of them is that I work in a different location entirely several miles away, and the other is that, at that other location, I work a schedule that is basically the exact opposite of the one that anyone at HQ is likely to work.
Because of this my approach would have to be one of just randomly walking up to someone in the cafeteria and immediately ask her out, as the two facts mentioned above would prevent me from being able to establish any sort of connection over time.
Putting aside the question of how well women respond to a total stranger just walking up to them and asking them out (which I can’t believe that, in general, they’d respond well to at all), we end up back at the matter of propriety and acceptable business behaviors.
Anyway, to get mostly off this topic, but to stick to the “hot chick” portion, last week I mentioned that I stumbled across a show on Food Network called “Everyday Italian.”
The star of the show is an extremely hot Italian-American woman, who, as I mentioned, sort of bugs me.
I had concluded that it was the fact that her “spokesmodel” style smile, which seems sort of odd of place and never goes away, coupled with a sort of crazed intensity in her eyes makes her look, well, sort of fucked in the head.
Beyond that, though, she wears these fairly glamorous clothes while she’s cooking, which also seem out of place. Also, whenever she’s just talking she sounds like your average American…until she says something like “mozzarella” or “spaghetti,” at which point she places an extreme emphasis on the words and tries way too hard to sound Italian.
With a name like Giada de Laurentis (and that nose), there’s no question that she’s authentically Italian (or rather, Italian-American), but when she tries to sound Italian, it sounds phony.
And irritating.
Still, as mentioned, she is hot, and she does cook some interesting meals, so despite the fact that all of these other things make her seem a little crazy and make me a little uneasy, or perhaps because of that uneasiness, I find that I’m powerless to look away.
So far everyday I’ve set her show to record on the DVR, and I sit and watch it in a confusing state of interest, irritation, annoyance, agitation, and mild arousal.
 |
As you can see, the chick is clearly crazy (and crazy hot) |
When I was leaving from the class today, as I do every time I leave from HQ, I found myself stuck for an extended period of time behind a long line of cars waiting for my chance to turn left.
I couldn’t help but think, “WTF?” I mean, it would be one thing if this happened once in a while, but this happens invariably.
Just every so often couldn’t I drive out to find no cars ahead of me, and/or a green light? I mean, statistically, shouldn’t that happen every so often?
But no, instead I continualy find myself stuck for ten minutes, and it’s not even like it’s just a couple of cars, or like it’s even just cars. Today there was a dump truck, a cement truck, a semi, and some sort of beat-up old van towing a huge trailer with what looked to be some sort of doomsday device being hauled in it.
Still, I did eventually make my way home, and it’s not like I really had anything to rush home for (other than to watch the crazy Italian chick), but even so, it’d be nice to catch a break every now and then.
Ah well.
In any case, there are a few things I want to do, so I guess that will do it for this entry (In which, you will note, I made use of some crazy HTML skillz, beeyotch!).
Monday, June 20, 2005
It Only Took Me A Decade, Useless Shops, Teenage Angst, And Bats In My Belfry
So it’s Monday again, which in my Bizarro version of life means that it’s my weekend.
Sort of, at least. After all, tomorrow and Wednesday I’ll be heading to headquarters to take a class in HTML.
As I mentioned last week, I’ve been meaning to learn HTML for almost ten years, but, in large part due to laziness, but mostly to the fact that in the past ten years there have been all sorts of developments in HTML-authoring software that have made it unnecessary, for the most part, to know anything about HTML.
Blogger’s posting interface, for example, converts everything I enter into it to HTML automatically.
So why bother learning HTML? Well, if you know the language you can fine-tune and tweak the output in a way that the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), drag and drop graphical style HTML editors don’t allow you to. For example, it’s very easy for me to put a link (come right back after you follow the link) into a Threshold entry using the automated system, but it’s only because I can go in and edit the HTML code manually (using what little knowledge of HTML I have) and set up the link so that it will open in a new window (and you can stay here while visiting the link).
Beyond that, while I’m not currently looking for a different job, it never hurts to add to the existing bag of tricks (which is why next month I’ll be taking a class in XML).
The past weekend at work was largely unremarkable and not really worth mentioning. I got up Friday, worked out, worked all day, slept, got up Saturday morning, worked out…well, you get the idea.
Today was a bit different from most Mondays, though. For one thing, I let myself sleep in (until 9:30), and when I got up I didn’t bother going for a walk. I just didn’t feel up to it.
Somewhere along the line Scott called to let me know that, if I wanted, we could go to a 4:00 show of “Batman Begins” rather than the 6:45 show we’d been planning, which sounded good to me.
Because it’s sort of a “midway point” for each of us as far as travel goes, we’d decided to go to the same theater we’d caught the midnight showing of “Revenge of the Sith.” In addition to the multiplex theater, that immediate area has several little shops and restaurants, and having nothing else to do, and, more importantly, no desire to do much of anything, I decided to “make a day of it,” and ended up heading for the theater at around 1:00, thinking that I could use the time to check out some of the little shops.
Beyond that, I knew that, under the best of circumstances, driving there would take at least a half an hour, and with traffic and all of the road construction along the way, another half an hour would be added to that.
My estimation turned out to be inaccurate, though, and I ended up arriving there a bit before 2:00, at which point I discovered that, pretty much like any plaza with shops in NoVA, where there’s altogether too much disposable income available to be wasted on useless crap, none of the shops were especially interesting.
Still, there were plenty of restaurants there, so I went to one and got a sandwich, which I ate al fresco, all the while being regaled with overheard tales of teenaged romantic angst from two girls sitting at the table next to mine.
I kept quiet, but I really wanted to chime in as one of the girls related her boyfriend woes to the other.
What would I have said to her, you ask? Well, I would have let her know that she was overthinking things (and if there’s one thing I know, it’s overthinking). After all, he’s a teenaged boy; he’s not likely to be that complicated.
And beyond that, if he’s really causing her that much anguish she should just dump him. After all, it’s not like he’d be difficult to replace. Just throw a rock in any direction, honey; you’re bound to hit another one just like him.
It’s not like the male of the species is some kind of rare commodity. My experience has taught me that the world is lousy with them.
And while it may (or may not) be true that a good one is hard to find, it’s not like the one you have now is all that great anyway, so what difference does it make?
And finally, I would have told her that none of it really matters; she’s way too young to be stressing about that kind of thing. Go out and have fun while you can and realize that you don’t have to commit yourself to anything or anyone just yet. Guys will come and go, and you’ve got plenty of time to find the right one. It’s not a race.
But of course being young, and therefore incapable of seeing just how small the small stuff really is, she wouldn’t have listened anyway, particularly if the advice was coming from some creepy old guy like me sitting outside alone eavesdropping on two pretty young girls…
After eating my lunch I still had a lot of time to kill, so I decided to drive over to the nearby mall, but instead ended up browsing in a nearby Barnes & Noble (if I’d thought ahead, I would have just brought a book with me in the first place and sat in the little plaza and read it), then at the CompUSA next to that.
That brought me much closer to showtime, so I headed back to the theater.
Once Scott arrived we went inside and found that in addition to being able to buy tickets at the little kiosks they have set up, you can also pay for and print out vouchers for your drinks and snacks. Very handy.
Most of the previews were lame, though the “Dukes of Hazzard” trailer was among them, featuring a few shots of Jessica Simpson in the bikini she wears while washing the General Lee in her video….*Sigh*
Even so, I have no interest in seeing the movie.
During the previews some comments that Scott and I made, or possibly just the fact that we were talking at all, made this older guy sitting in front of us get up and leave. Not sure what the deal was with that, but in any case that brings us, finally, to the feature presentation.
I liked it.
It wasn’t spectacular, but it was better than any of the other Batman movies. Of course, anyone who knows how I feel about the other Batman movies knows that really isn’t saying much, but even so, this was decent.
Sixteen years ago when the Tim Burton version came out, many comic fans in general, and Batman fans in particular, were, understandably, leery. After all, the only vision of the Dark Knight shared by the public at large was of the 60’s series, with its bad jokes and dialogue, cheesy on-screen graphics meant to mimic the look and feel of comic books, ridiculous bat-named items Batman and Robin’s utility belts contained (such as “Bat Shark Repellent”), and all the rest of the irritating nonsense, so it wasn’t unreasonable for us to expect to see a beloved character subjected to ridicule on the big screen.
That didn’t happen. As much as I didn’t (and don’t) like Burton’s vision of Batman, I will at least acknowledge that he treated the character with respect.
He just did a lousy job of casting and made a dead-boring movie.
However, the fact that he didn’t include biffs, bams, or pows in the movie was enough to melt the hearts of a lot of fans, leading them to overlook the movie’s many other shortcomings.
I could go on at length about how much I disliked the first two movies, and at even greater length about how much I hated the two that followed, but I’ll spare you that (at least for today), and focus instead on the current movie, which, as mentioned, I did actually like.
Unlike his predecessors, Christian Bale actually did well in both roles: that of Batman and that of Bruce Wayne. What helped him in particular was that his muscles didn’t disappear once the costume came off. Unlike Keaton, he fit the bill for the description of handsome Bruce Wayne, and he actually looked like someone who might have spent a good portion of his life honing his body to physical perfection, and who could actually hold his own in a fight.
Keaton’s Batman, minus the muscles built into the suit, looked like someone who had maybe visited a personal trainer once or twice and who could be overcome by a gang of vicious Girl Scouts.
The less said about Kilmer and Clooney the better.
In any case, it was nice to see a physically fit Batman, particularly as we got to see some of his training in advanced fighting techniques, which would have been totaly unbelievable with Keaton.
Overall, the costume looked good, though I didn’t like the way that the ears sort of pointed in.
One complaint I do have about the costume (and it’s one I’ve had about the costume in all of the movies) is the fact that you can see his eyes.
Originally it may have been a matter of expediency, and later it may have been a matter of artistic license, but typically Batman’s mask is presented as obscuring his eyes, leaving them a blank white.
I think this is an essential aspect of his appearance, adding to his overall fearsome appearance and making him appear to be something other than human. Also, eyes, being the window to the soul, can be a very distinguishing feature. Obscuring them can only add to his ability to conceal his true identity.
Beyond that, having some sort of lenses to cover his eyes adds functionality to the costume, as night-vision can be built-in.
From the perspective of filmmaking, I can understand why they would choose to show his eyes.
(Though I always wonder how the black make-up he puts on around them magically appears and disapppears)
After all, with significant portions of his face covered, it’s only through his eyes that an actor can really manage to emote.
It’s the reason, for example, that for an extended period of time Tobey Maguire went about maskless in “Spider-Man 2,” and his inability to act with his eyes was a major complaint James Marsden had about his role as Cyclops in the “X-Men” movies.
What filmmakers (and costume designers) fail to realize, though, is that in the case of Batman, emoting is what Bruce Wayne is for.
Beyond just being scary and mean, Batman doesn’t emote; that’s part of what makes him scary.
Speaking of scary, there is a great interrogation scene in the movie. Bats was nice and scary in it. There is definitely something to be said for dangling people upside-down from a great height...
Though not always doing so directly, much of the story drew from Frank Miller’s “Year One,” which detailed the events of Batman’s first year in action.
That’s hardly surprising, considering that this movie had a very similar focus, but beyond that, Miller’s work on Batman is pretty much definitive. I would say that, arguably, what Miller did with Batman has been more significant and definitive than the work of Bob Kane (Batman’s creator), or anyone who came after. Miller’s stamp on Batman is indelible.
That being said, very little is lifted directly from “Year One,” beyond a particular device that Batman uses, though I will say that Gary Oldman’s Jim Gordon looked as though he walked directly off the pages of “Year One.”
As for the rest of the cast, I liked Liam Neeson in his role as he took on Bruce Wayne as his young padewan….err, student, and helped him complete his training.
The guy who played the Scarecrow, which, given the thematic elements of the movie, was a good choice for villain, filled the role quite nicely (I don’t remember his name, and don’t feel like looking it up. It’s something Irish, I think.).
Katie Holmes was okay as the love-interest, though basically she was just there. Her best scene came towards the end, when she was braless in a silk blouse on what appeared to be a chilly day…
I liked Michael Caine as Alfred, though I suspect that has more to do with the fact that I like Michael Caine. Alfred’s humor should be a little bit more wry, I think, and Caine wasn’t quite so stiff as he ought to have been, but even so, I thought he did fine.
Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox was very entertaining as well, though I did note that he seemed to be, in some ways, an amalgam of two characters from the comics, filling the role not only of Fox, but also of Dr. Leslie Thompkins.
In the comics (and on the animated series), Dr. Thompkins was a friend of Bruce’s father, and, to what extent she could, tried to help Alfred raise young Bruce after his parents’ deaths.
She’s also, in later years, privy to his secrets. Fox didn’t serve as a surrogate mother to young Bruce, obviously, but he does serve as something of a confidant in a way that the Fox of the comics never has.
There was another amalgam character in the form of Gordon’s corrupt partner Detective Flass.
In “Year One,” Flass was a big bruiser (a former Green Beret) who Gordon eventually took down. In the movie, he was basically just a big slob, which gave him a lot more in common with the supporting Batman character Harvey Bullock than with his actual namesake.
The action in the movie was often so fast-paced as to be a bit confusing, but overall it was satisfying, and the advantage of having a more physically fit Batman was that he didn’t spend most of his time just sitting in the Batmobile pushing buttons (or worse, flying in the Batwing and shooting [!] people).
In summary, “Batman Begins” has definite possibilities as the start of a new franchise, and seeing it was an okay way to spend an afternoon.
In other comic book movie news, I found an interesting article about the filming of the upcoming “V for Vendetta” movie (If you don’t have a login for the NY Times, go to http://www.bugmenot.com/ to grab one). “V” writer Alan Moore (whose talent and brilliance, in my estimation, make him like unto a god, though he looks more like someone who should be living in a shack somewhere writing manifestoes while engaged in a standoff with the ATF rather than writing comic books), has no involvement with this movie (or any movie based on his works), not even from a financial aspect, also created a seminal Batman work several years ago, which the people involved with the ’89 movie claimed to have drawn a lot of inspiration from.
What elements they drew from it were extremely limited and poorly executed but…well, I said I wouldn’t go on at length about my antipathy towards those movies.
In any case, for more info on the new movie, go here and read an article about the new Batmobile (which I didn’t initially like, but warmed to after seeing it in action).
There’s also a link in there about how the suit works. It’s all pretty interesting and entertaining.
In any case, I should turn in soon, as I have to be bright-eyed and bushy – ah, who am I kidding? I’ve never been either of those things in my life. Still, I should probably try to be reasonably well-rested for my class tomorrow.
Sort of, at least. After all, tomorrow and Wednesday I’ll be heading to headquarters to take a class in HTML.
As I mentioned last week, I’ve been meaning to learn HTML for almost ten years, but, in large part due to laziness, but mostly to the fact that in the past ten years there have been all sorts of developments in HTML-authoring software that have made it unnecessary, for the most part, to know anything about HTML.
Blogger’s posting interface, for example, converts everything I enter into it to HTML automatically.
So why bother learning HTML? Well, if you know the language you can fine-tune and tweak the output in a way that the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), drag and drop graphical style HTML editors don’t allow you to. For example, it’s very easy for me to put a link (come right back after you follow the link) into a Threshold entry using the automated system, but it’s only because I can go in and edit the HTML code manually (using what little knowledge of HTML I have) and set up the link so that it will open in a new window (and you can stay here while visiting the link).
Beyond that, while I’m not currently looking for a different job, it never hurts to add to the existing bag of tricks (which is why next month I’ll be taking a class in XML).
The past weekend at work was largely unremarkable and not really worth mentioning. I got up Friday, worked out, worked all day, slept, got up Saturday morning, worked out…well, you get the idea.
Today was a bit different from most Mondays, though. For one thing, I let myself sleep in (until 9:30), and when I got up I didn’t bother going for a walk. I just didn’t feel up to it.
Somewhere along the line Scott called to let me know that, if I wanted, we could go to a 4:00 show of “Batman Begins” rather than the 6:45 show we’d been planning, which sounded good to me.
Because it’s sort of a “midway point” for each of us as far as travel goes, we’d decided to go to the same theater we’d caught the midnight showing of “Revenge of the Sith.” In addition to the multiplex theater, that immediate area has several little shops and restaurants, and having nothing else to do, and, more importantly, no desire to do much of anything, I decided to “make a day of it,” and ended up heading for the theater at around 1:00, thinking that I could use the time to check out some of the little shops.
Beyond that, I knew that, under the best of circumstances, driving there would take at least a half an hour, and with traffic and all of the road construction along the way, another half an hour would be added to that.
My estimation turned out to be inaccurate, though, and I ended up arriving there a bit before 2:00, at which point I discovered that, pretty much like any plaza with shops in NoVA, where there’s altogether too much disposable income available to be wasted on useless crap, none of the shops were especially interesting.
Still, there were plenty of restaurants there, so I went to one and got a sandwich, which I ate al fresco, all the while being regaled with overheard tales of teenaged romantic angst from two girls sitting at the table next to mine.
I kept quiet, but I really wanted to chime in as one of the girls related her boyfriend woes to the other.
What would I have said to her, you ask? Well, I would have let her know that she was overthinking things (and if there’s one thing I know, it’s overthinking). After all, he’s a teenaged boy; he’s not likely to be that complicated.
And beyond that, if he’s really causing her that much anguish she should just dump him. After all, it’s not like he’d be difficult to replace. Just throw a rock in any direction, honey; you’re bound to hit another one just like him.
It’s not like the male of the species is some kind of rare commodity. My experience has taught me that the world is lousy with them.
And while it may (or may not) be true that a good one is hard to find, it’s not like the one you have now is all that great anyway, so what difference does it make?
And finally, I would have told her that none of it really matters; she’s way too young to be stressing about that kind of thing. Go out and have fun while you can and realize that you don’t have to commit yourself to anything or anyone just yet. Guys will come and go, and you’ve got plenty of time to find the right one. It’s not a race.
But of course being young, and therefore incapable of seeing just how small the small stuff really is, she wouldn’t have listened anyway, particularly if the advice was coming from some creepy old guy like me sitting outside alone eavesdropping on two pretty young girls…
After eating my lunch I still had a lot of time to kill, so I decided to drive over to the nearby mall, but instead ended up browsing in a nearby Barnes & Noble (if I’d thought ahead, I would have just brought a book with me in the first place and sat in the little plaza and read it), then at the CompUSA next to that.
That brought me much closer to showtime, so I headed back to the theater.
Once Scott arrived we went inside and found that in addition to being able to buy tickets at the little kiosks they have set up, you can also pay for and print out vouchers for your drinks and snacks. Very handy.
Most of the previews were lame, though the “Dukes of Hazzard” trailer was among them, featuring a few shots of Jessica Simpson in the bikini she wears while washing the General Lee in her video….*Sigh*
Even so, I have no interest in seeing the movie.
During the previews some comments that Scott and I made, or possibly just the fact that we were talking at all, made this older guy sitting in front of us get up and leave. Not sure what the deal was with that, but in any case that brings us, finally, to the feature presentation.
I liked it.
It wasn’t spectacular, but it was better than any of the other Batman movies. Of course, anyone who knows how I feel about the other Batman movies knows that really isn’t saying much, but even so, this was decent.
Sixteen years ago when the Tim Burton version came out, many comic fans in general, and Batman fans in particular, were, understandably, leery. After all, the only vision of the Dark Knight shared by the public at large was of the 60’s series, with its bad jokes and dialogue, cheesy on-screen graphics meant to mimic the look and feel of comic books, ridiculous bat-named items Batman and Robin’s utility belts contained (such as “Bat Shark Repellent”), and all the rest of the irritating nonsense, so it wasn’t unreasonable for us to expect to see a beloved character subjected to ridicule on the big screen.
That didn’t happen. As much as I didn’t (and don’t) like Burton’s vision of Batman, I will at least acknowledge that he treated the character with respect.
He just did a lousy job of casting and made a dead-boring movie.
However, the fact that he didn’t include biffs, bams, or pows in the movie was enough to melt the hearts of a lot of fans, leading them to overlook the movie’s many other shortcomings.
I could go on at length about how much I disliked the first two movies, and at even greater length about how much I hated the two that followed, but I’ll spare you that (at least for today), and focus instead on the current movie, which, as mentioned, I did actually like.
Unlike his predecessors, Christian Bale actually did well in both roles: that of Batman and that of Bruce Wayne. What helped him in particular was that his muscles didn’t disappear once the costume came off. Unlike Keaton, he fit the bill for the description of handsome Bruce Wayne, and he actually looked like someone who might have spent a good portion of his life honing his body to physical perfection, and who could actually hold his own in a fight.
Keaton’s Batman, minus the muscles built into the suit, looked like someone who had maybe visited a personal trainer once or twice and who could be overcome by a gang of vicious Girl Scouts.
The less said about Kilmer and Clooney the better.
In any case, it was nice to see a physically fit Batman, particularly as we got to see some of his training in advanced fighting techniques, which would have been totaly unbelievable with Keaton.
Overall, the costume looked good, though I didn’t like the way that the ears sort of pointed in.
One complaint I do have about the costume (and it’s one I’ve had about the costume in all of the movies) is the fact that you can see his eyes.
Originally it may have been a matter of expediency, and later it may have been a matter of artistic license, but typically Batman’s mask is presented as obscuring his eyes, leaving them a blank white.
I think this is an essential aspect of his appearance, adding to his overall fearsome appearance and making him appear to be something other than human. Also, eyes, being the window to the soul, can be a very distinguishing feature. Obscuring them can only add to his ability to conceal his true identity.
Beyond that, having some sort of lenses to cover his eyes adds functionality to the costume, as night-vision can be built-in.
From the perspective of filmmaking, I can understand why they would choose to show his eyes.
(Though I always wonder how the black make-up he puts on around them magically appears and disapppears)
After all, with significant portions of his face covered, it’s only through his eyes that an actor can really manage to emote.
It’s the reason, for example, that for an extended period of time Tobey Maguire went about maskless in “Spider-Man 2,” and his inability to act with his eyes was a major complaint James Marsden had about his role as Cyclops in the “X-Men” movies.
What filmmakers (and costume designers) fail to realize, though, is that in the case of Batman, emoting is what Bruce Wayne is for.
Beyond just being scary and mean, Batman doesn’t emote; that’s part of what makes him scary.
Speaking of scary, there is a great interrogation scene in the movie. Bats was nice and scary in it. There is definitely something to be said for dangling people upside-down from a great height...
Though not always doing so directly, much of the story drew from Frank Miller’s “Year One,” which detailed the events of Batman’s first year in action.
That’s hardly surprising, considering that this movie had a very similar focus, but beyond that, Miller’s work on Batman is pretty much definitive. I would say that, arguably, what Miller did with Batman has been more significant and definitive than the work of Bob Kane (Batman’s creator), or anyone who came after. Miller’s stamp on Batman is indelible.
That being said, very little is lifted directly from “Year One,” beyond a particular device that Batman uses, though I will say that Gary Oldman’s Jim Gordon looked as though he walked directly off the pages of “Year One.”
As for the rest of the cast, I liked Liam Neeson in his role as he took on Bruce Wayne as his young padewan….err, student, and helped him complete his training.
The guy who played the Scarecrow, which, given the thematic elements of the movie, was a good choice for villain, filled the role quite nicely (I don’t remember his name, and don’t feel like looking it up. It’s something Irish, I think.).
Katie Holmes was okay as the love-interest, though basically she was just there. Her best scene came towards the end, when she was braless in a silk blouse on what appeared to be a chilly day…
I liked Michael Caine as Alfred, though I suspect that has more to do with the fact that I like Michael Caine. Alfred’s humor should be a little bit more wry, I think, and Caine wasn’t quite so stiff as he ought to have been, but even so, I thought he did fine.
Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox was very entertaining as well, though I did note that he seemed to be, in some ways, an amalgam of two characters from the comics, filling the role not only of Fox, but also of Dr. Leslie Thompkins.
In the comics (and on the animated series), Dr. Thompkins was a friend of Bruce’s father, and, to what extent she could, tried to help Alfred raise young Bruce after his parents’ deaths.
She’s also, in later years, privy to his secrets. Fox didn’t serve as a surrogate mother to young Bruce, obviously, but he does serve as something of a confidant in a way that the Fox of the comics never has.
There was another amalgam character in the form of Gordon’s corrupt partner Detective Flass.
In “Year One,” Flass was a big bruiser (a former Green Beret) who Gordon eventually took down. In the movie, he was basically just a big slob, which gave him a lot more in common with the supporting Batman character Harvey Bullock than with his actual namesake.
The action in the movie was often so fast-paced as to be a bit confusing, but overall it was satisfying, and the advantage of having a more physically fit Batman was that he didn’t spend most of his time just sitting in the Batmobile pushing buttons (or worse, flying in the Batwing and shooting [!] people).
In summary, “Batman Begins” has definite possibilities as the start of a new franchise, and seeing it was an okay way to spend an afternoon.
In other comic book movie news, I found an interesting article about the filming of the upcoming “V for Vendetta” movie (If you don’t have a login for the NY Times, go to http://www.bugmenot.com/ to grab one). “V” writer Alan Moore (whose talent and brilliance, in my estimation, make him like unto a god, though he looks more like someone who should be living in a shack somewhere writing manifestoes while engaged in a standoff with the ATF rather than writing comic books), has no involvement with this movie (or any movie based on his works), not even from a financial aspect, also created a seminal Batman work several years ago, which the people involved with the ’89 movie claimed to have drawn a lot of inspiration from.
What elements they drew from it were extremely limited and poorly executed but…well, I said I wouldn’t go on at length about my antipathy towards those movies.
In any case, for more info on the new movie, go here and read an article about the new Batmobile (which I didn’t initially like, but warmed to after seeing it in action).
There’s also a link in there about how the suit works. It’s all pretty interesting and entertaining.
In any case, I should turn in soon, as I have to be bright-eyed and bushy – ah, who am I kidding? I’ve never been either of those things in my life. Still, I should probably try to be reasonably well-rested for my class tomorrow.
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