« Archives in October, 2006

Just Call Me Tannin Jones

October 31, 2006 / posted in Food / No Comments

I have no idea exactly how to describe this, but I seem to be craving tannins lately. OK, I take that back, I know exactly how to describe it: I’ve been craving tannings lately; I’m more confused as to what the heck is going on. Who needs bitter flavors with an astringent feel on the tongue? But I can’t stop drinking tea and cheap, young red wine.
It’s a cost-effective jones, as these things go — tea’s mostly hot water anyway — but sometimes that $6 bottle of wine does go wrong. I got tannins aplenty with a cheap bottle of some grape I’d never even heard of last week — the wine could best have been described as “aggressive,” and wasn’t entirely undrinkable, just too strong to taste what I was trying to eat. The new bottle of wine that my neighbor left here, half-empty, is going down well enough tonight, though.
There have been other cravings before, weird ones. When I got back from “Southeast Asia”:http://juniorbird.smugmug.com/Travel/200720 I wanted everything “fermented”:http://www.recipesource.com/ethnic/asia/vietnamese/00/rec0039.html — a craving well-enough handled with some store-bought _nam pla_ and powdered dried shrimp. Granted, you could smell my cooking a block away, but it made people happy. There was also a tamarind phase, but, let’s face it, you can get “tamarind soda”:http://www.novamex.com/jarritos.sstg all over this town.
Perhaps I should try a more normal craving, like chocolate or pickles. Chocolate, at least, would be popular, and there’s quite the variety of gourmet and even milk-free options for me to choose from. Pickles are a more typical jones, and actually one I had a few years ago; then it was for the sweet chips that we “Baltimorons”:http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Baltimoron tend to eat like potato chips. Can’t get good enough ones of those out here.
What crazy, irresistible food urge is next? “Crab chips”:http://www.utzsnacks.com/products/regchips.html? Butter? Sausage? “Hufu”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu? The mind boggles.















Tweaker Cone

October 29, 2006 / posted in Otherwise Uncategorized / 1 Comment

For some reason I don’t fully understand, every time I go to my neighborhood McDonald’s[1], there’s some methampehtamine addict waiting in line for a vanilla cone. Is it that vanilla cones are the outside equivalent of cigarettes in the joint, a convenient medium of trade in the absence of cash? Apart from the presence of cash on the outside, that is? Are McDonald’s cones a good substitute for Tylenol, now that Tylenol is a controlled substance? Is there something special in the vanilla cone itself? If so, can just anyone get a special cone, or does one have to be visibly tweaking to get the “special dip”? Either way, I’m allergic to milk, so I’ll never find out.
Part of me wonders if this is just an artifact of my neighborhood. Maybe normal people taking the drive-through get cones too, but I only see the people who walk to the restaurant and go up to the counter to get cones, and the ones who go up to the counter in my ‘hood are all twacked out.
It’s great entertainment; they shuffle in place as they wait in line, then get to the front and order a cone, paying with what’s clearly one of the last few dollars they have left. Then they’ll do a little dance in a circle while they wait for the cone, adding in maybe a some quiet muttering as their hands move to their shoulders and elbows and back. But I never see them pick at their faces, either while waiting for the cone or after getting it. A tweaker waiting nicely and not picking for 5 minutes — must be a world record. Think I could patent the concept and sell it to recovery centers? “Your son has a very serious problem, Mr. and Mrs. Jaworski, but, with a residential setting, group therapy twice a day, and a vanilla cone three times an hour — chocolate-dipped on Saturdays — we’re sure he’ll be fine in a month. You should probably hide the “oxycontin”:http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/ before he comes home. I’ll see you in two weeks for an update, you can leave your check with billing on your way out.”
Another free business model, courtesy Juniorbird.com. Don’t thank me, I do it because I care. Now go forth and replace the twack with the “trans fat”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat!
fn1. Yes, I know it’ll kill me faster than a crazy North Korean with nuclear weapons ([_ed. note: soon to be determined experimentally_]), but I only hit the MacDo, as the French call it, when I’m having a bad day. The presence or absence of bad days is, of course, not the topic of this entry. Maybe later. Or maybe I’ll write about “CVS and SVN”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/002775.html more. We’ll see; bet you can guess.















Sometimes Stupid Isn’t Funny Anymore

October 24, 2006 / posted in Politics / 2 Comments

I have this half-written, incredibly snarky entry that, with substantial humor, skewered the Bush Administration. It was actually pretty good for something written in the form of a primer on the concept of planning. It even reached for the rating of “funny”, but now I realize that sometimes the times we live in are not funny. Sometimes the times we live in are fucking hopeless. It’s not that our leaders don’t know how to plan; our problem is, they don’t even know how to _win_.
This episode of melancholy was brought on by a disastrous statement hidden inside an otherwise-par for the course article: “White House: No dramatic Iraq policy shift”:http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/10/24/us.iraq.ap/index.html. Now, the headline gives us non-news news; of course there will be no policy changes. Our leaders lack the ability to learn and improve that allowed, say, the Roosevelt administration to back away from losing strategies in 1941 and develop the approaches that ultimately crushed Imperial Japan. This failure to learn and change has been a given for years, and there’s no use crying over that particular spilt milk. But there is one paragraph in the article, one solitary quote that tells us what’s really going on in our commander-in-chief’s mind:
bq. Bush, in a CNBC interview, said, “Well, I’ve been talking about a change in tactics ever since I — ever since we went in, because the role of the commander in chief is to say to our generals, ‘You adjust to the enemy on the battlefield.’”
Ah. So that’s the role of the commander-in-chief! I somehow had gotten it into my mind that he commanded.
I’ve got a new idea: let’s not adjust to the enemy on the battlefield; let’s make him adjust to us. Let’s have a plan and get so far ahead of the enemy on his “OODA loop”:http://cleverbird.com/wiki/LeadershipTechniques/OODALoop that we’re making all of the decisions and he’s doing all of the reacting. How about that for something the commander-in-chief could put together for (or, better, with) our generals?
Seriously, has anyone out there ever played checkers? So, when you play checkers, you _actively_ try to take the strategic positions along the edge of the board, the ones you can’t be jumped out of. You don’t just sit there and countermove to every move your opponent makes; if you just countermove then suddenly you discover you opponent controls the edges of the board and can doube-jump you whatever move you make. This is basic. This is elementary. Heck, this is _elementary school_. We’re not talking chess here, we’re talking _checkers_. This is, like, Intro to Initiative for six-year-olds.
In war, as in every competitive activity, taking the initiative is key. Having the initiative forces your enemy to _react_, rather than getting to _act_, to do whatever it is that they want to do. While a powerful enemy can react powerfully, at least the universe of reactions is limited to the possible responses to your action, whereas the universe of actions available to an enemy who can do whatever it is they want to do is infinite. Losing the initiative requires you to figure out what to do about all of those potential actions, and sets you up for punishment for underplanning for any given eventuality. I mean, losing the initiative is what gives you situations in which the enemy just landed 300,000 troops in Normandy while you’ve got your whole army in Russia (oops). Heck, _dogs_ appreciate the value of initiative — have you ever seen a pack of dogs? They can’t even see in color and they can take the initiative over that crafty neighborhood cat. Because, you know, that’s the only way you ever get to eat cat.
Somehow, our administration has lost sight of the fact that the initiative is worth having. They’re happy to sit around and wait for the enemy to do something, and then say to the generals “hey, worry about that for us will you, huh?” I will spare you the psychoanaysis but it is fascinating to wonder how people could have gotten so powerful without having to learn that they needed to take the initiative.
At this rate, it’s not just that we’re doing poorly at our wars; it’s that, without any definition of victory and without the initiative, and thus control, in our hands, our wars are acutally _unwinnable_ (although, to be fair, we could still get lucky and have our enemies lose). Heck, at this point, I wish they’d just put Karl Rove in charge of international policy, because clearly he understands planning and gaining the initiative. Why can’t the Republicans run a war as well as they can run an election?















War Is Over (If You Want it to Be)

October 22, 2006 / posted in Reviews / 1 Comment

“The US vs. John Lennon”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478049/ leaves a lot on the table. It could have been a thunderous call to call to action, a strong statement of a way in which we could follow in Lennon’s footsteps in today’s eerily similar times, but instead it was just a shrine to an artist. In that way, and in many others, it was truly a film for the political environment in which we live — intriguing, horrifying, demanding action, and ultimately empty of vigor.
The movie starts at the end of the Beatles’ run, and tells us of Lennon’s political awakening and first meeting with Yoko Ono. Typically, this is the tragic part of the story — the wondrous foursome is torn apart by the evil woman — but, in this take on the breakup, we see John choosing reasonably to become political (“if 100 million people listen to me say ‘I wanna hold your hand’, why shouldn’t 100 million people listen to me say ‘give peace a chance’?”), and Yoko being a big part of that growth as they both discovered new ways to express themselves through art. They talk, covered by a big paper bag; they hold their famous bed-in; it’s all good times.
And it’s moving times, too. We see protest, we see Kent State, we see photos of the war in Vietnam, and of course any reasonable person says “well, somebody should do something about that.” The movie expertly cuts down the power structure at the time, with a clearly unhinged G. Gordon Liddy describing the Nixon administration’s behavior, and juxtaposing the jowelly and obviously fascist speech of J. Edgar Hoover with the media-savvy rebel Angela Davis. The paralells with today are obvious, especially insofar as a paranoid, silent administration, overseeing an unpopular war, smears all who oppose it with the “unpatriotic” label.
But then it’s all lost. Lennon looks out of his depth next to Bobby Seale, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. He can’t keep the difference between “policy” and “philosophy” straight, he says that others’ substantive goals are “what [he's] been saying all along,” and he advocated arming yourself for self-defense. His drug-fueled lifestyle is glossed over but, hey, who doesn’t at least have to think for a moment when asked “should we let self-admitted junkies get green cards?”
The plot turns to Lennon’s fight with the INS, which had been instructed by the Nixon administration to get the singer out of the country. Now, this could have been a meaty section of the film, but too little time is spent on the conspiracy itself and too much on how John and Yoko felt about it. Nixon worried that Lennon would sing at a protest at the Republican National Convention in Miami in 1972, and this INS harassment did scare Lennon off of doing that, with Yoko worrying that he’d be killed if he went to Miami. But the only counterculture figure verifiably assassinated by the Nixon adminstration was Fred Hampton — that’s just one out of thousands of prominent individuals — and one wonders what Lennon would have chosen if he’d known he’d be killed for no good reason whatsoever eight years later.
After Lennon wins his court case against the INS and gets to stay in the US, the movie falls victim to French Director’s Disease — there’s no obvious way to end it, and it all just sputters away until the end credits run. We see home movies of John, Yoko, and Sean, we skip over Lennon’s famous “lost weekend,” there’s no discussion of his struggles with drugs, and everything’s all happy, sunny days until, suddenly, Mark David Chapman ruins it all. Then people with ’80s hairstyles cry.
_The US vs. John Lennon_ could, perhaps, have been re-titled _John Lennon vs. the US_, a story of how this icon stood against the US for five years. Or, perhaps, it could have been titled _John Lennon, 1968-1973_, because that’s what it really was. If true accuracy was required _Fun With Archival Footage, Final Cut Pro Filters, and Bad Compositing_ might be the most accurate title. The interviews are shot against green screen and then abstract backgrounds are badly composited in; black halos are visible everywhere. With the exception of some probably authentically-degraded 8mm home movies, all of the archival footage has had the “old footage” filter run on it, with scratches and lines crossing the screen. It’s all very _E! True Hollywood Story_ in production values.
And, in the end, it leaves what could have been a passionate call to stand against a stupid modern war, just as the baby boomers stood against a stupid ’60s war, as just a good TV documentary, just a shrine to a beloved artist.















What To Do When Your Boss Sucks (and You’re the Boss)

October 18, 2006 / posted in Bidness / 2 Comments

I hate my job; I spend all of my day fooling with financial projections, and when I don’t get everything done that I’m supposed to, my boss hassles me and makes me feel like I’m a failure. Dammit, it’s just no fun at all.
Did I mention lately that it’s my own company and I’m my own boss? Yeah, that’s how it is. It’s tough when there’s work you don’t really enjoy doing (hey, if I truly loved balance sheets, I’d have gotten a job as an I-banker). But it’s all got a good reason for getting done — otherwise I wouldn’t do it. Now that is one benefit of being in charge, I only do what’s worth doing.
So what’s worth doing is getting my financials forecasted out to the highest possible level of detail. I actually rather enjoy putting together the “cash flow statement”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statement_of_cash_flows, because that’s where the rubber really meets the road: it answers the question “can we cover our expenses this month?” The “income statement”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_statement is moderately handy, because at least it tells me if we’re making a profit or not. But the “balance sheet”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_sheet? Well, that’s great if you’re doing strategic planning or valuation for a large corporation, but of less value if you’re asking whether or not you can stay alive another week.
So, yeah, I’m bored of my work, but that’s good, because I left the boring stuff for last. So that means I must be almost done, and, if I’m almost done, then things must be about ready to happen. And that’s exciting, ’cause I’d like to be actually, ya know, _doing something_. And my own company is agreat place for that to happen.
Anyway, it’s either that or move to Vietnam. For the food, you know, and the women, and the colors.















The Day the Music Died

October 16, 2006 / posted in Otherwise Uncategorized / 2 Comments

I was in the midst of watching the exciting Philly-Saints game when it happened; all of a sudden, my TV screen turned black and I could hear the hard drive on my Tivo thrashing. I waite and waited for my football to return but, sadly, there was nothing but black. So I pulled the plug, gave it a moment, and then restarted. My Tivo came back to life, told me to wait a moment, then told me to wait a moment, then told me to wait a moment…
!/images/deadtivo/bsod.jpg!
OK, this wasn’t going well. Two pulled-plug restarts later, I called Tivo tech support and, after a laudably short time spent on hold, I was walked through a short troubleshooting process. Well, short-because-we-never-get-enough-activity-out-of -the-DVR-to-get-past-step-1 troubleshooting process. My beloved Tivo was thereupon officially pronounced dead by the incessantly sunny, helpful tech.
Now, I’m not angry my Tivo died; I’ve had it for 3 1/2 years, and, frankly, that’s about as long as hard drives last these days. Yes, I hoped it would last a little longer, maybe long enough for me to get some money and decide if I wanted to go all HD or not, but it was a good, full run, and Lord knows I’ve kept the thing either recording or playing every free minute for all of those 3 1/2 years. Of course, there’s no warranty replacement for a 3 1/2-year old piece of consumer electronics, so I was offered a small discount on a Tivo, although the tech suggested I go out and buy one, ’cause I’d save money that way. And, living in fear of being Tivo-less, I did. I found a Tivo at Best Buy, within walking distance, for just $30 after rebate, so off I went.
Of course, when I got to Best Buy, they had something better, so I paid $60 (after rebate, of course) and took that home instead. No, I didn’t feel bad for ditching the girl I came there for; the new one is much sexier.
!/images/deadtivo/dually.jpg!
That’s right, I got a dual-tuner Tivo. No more Sunday nights of football vs. Simpsons, or Thursday nights of Ugly Betty vs. My Name is Earl; now I get to have my cake and eat it too (supposing that at least one piece of my cake is in basic cable).
The dual-tuner box is almost the same as the single-tuner one, so it took just moments to plug in; set-up took longer, but soon that familiar Tivo screen was in front of me. And then, tragedy struck again!
!/images/deadtivo/empty.jpg!
Ooh, there’s the catch: Tivo keeps all of my personal preferences on my personal machine, not on its network. That means that my lovingly-refined and -prioritized season passes are all gone, all of the secret times I’ve found to tape things at are forgotten, the relative importance of all of the shows I watch must be recalculated. It’s a mess. Or, rather, it’s an empty space, the opposite of a mess, but the same in end effect: just as hard to fight as a massive pile of spaghetti. I’ll have to rebuild all of my season passes.
Maybe that’ll be a good thing; maybe I’ll try to pick some new shows I’d like to see, and throw away some ones I was bored of. I’m just sad that I hadn’t seen the Battlestar Galactica and USC vs. U Dub games taped on Friday and Saturday; those, I’ll be sad to miss. But by tomorrow I know that the twin beneficent forces of my new Tivo and syndication will have brought me a whole pile of Law and Orders with which to distract my broken heart. That is, if I program Law and Order back in.















Welcome to My Shit List1

October 14, 2006 / posted in Shit List / 4 Comments

Cingular, which chooses not to put my calls through nearly as often as it actually connects me
People “who”:http://babblog.com/[2] “write”:http://millatimes.com/milla/journalmain.htm “better”:http://blog.myspace.com/sesquipedalianbipedal “than”:http://www.goer.org/Journal/ me, because, dammit, I just don’t go to 11 like y’all do
Drywall, which is insufficiently strong to contain my screws, bolts, etc., without the aid of a stud
My landlord, who won’t repair my leaks[3]
Myself, because, when I do something brilliant, I feel the need to crow about it rather than keep my crafty techniques in my back pocket for when I _really_ need them
People who declaim their love too late, but not really too late
The garbageman, who doesn’t manage to pick up our garbage on alternate weeks
Whoever made cockatoos “screamy”:http://www.anbg.gov.au/sounds/cockatoo.mp3
Words in general, because I either use too many or too few, but never exactly enough[4]
Whoever it is that has my Pyrex dish and measuring spoons, both of which I fear ended up in New York
Shows that are only on TV in one particular time slot and thus can’t be Tivoed at 3am so that I can watch them the next day, forcing me to decide what I want to watch in that time slot
“Ruby on Rails”:http://rubyonrails.org/, which is fascinating and exciting and which I have entirely too little time to learn
My other business concept, which appears staggeringly smart and well-timed but which is in fact so flaky that I can’t justify making time for it
That I can’t hide entries in Movable Type[5]
Speaking of Movable Type, its “badly-broken export function”:http://www.blogography.com/archives/2006/04/movablehype.html
SSH, because it’s hard to configure, although it makes up for that by being fun to use
Republicans, in general
People who post lists to their blogs, with insufficient commentary
People who use lots of footnotes in their blogs, forcing me to scroll up and down[6]
My fridge, which is empty, except for a container of simple syrup, two kinds of cheese, an ounce or so of soy milk, various condiments, and excess sauce for the Indian food I made two weeks ago
Friends who “blog in languages I can’t read”:http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-KEV8Wjg8cqhUoTf0re7TOA–?cq=1
The money-based economy
My complete inability to even come up with an interesting thing to blog about lately
McDonald’s, which is moderately tasty, totally sinful, and geographically convenient
People who don’t like big type
Neighbors who involve me in the middle of their bullshit
If I don’t stop here, “writing this frickin’ entry” is going to make this list soon, so, presto, finito.
fn1. Not that I’m in a bad mood, just that I enjoy keeping lists
fn2. Maybe not this issue, but usually
fn3. Hello rainy season!
fn4. And because that’s the words’ fault, not mine
fn5. Technically “I can”:http://plugins.movalog.com/mt-protect/, but I’m too lazy and this isn’t quite what I want anyway
fn6. No, seriously, I’m not making fun of myself, I don’t like this writing technique at all















Curses! Foleyed Again!

October 6, 2006 / posted in Politics / 3 Comments

All the liberals I know are pretty thrilled at this whole Mark Foley (R-FL) gets caught molesting underage congressional pages thing; they’re enjoying the potential lost GOP House seat, the bloodiness of the scandal, the threat to Hastert leading the House. But not me; I think it’s all a Republican conspiracy, and, like most Republican conspiracies, it’s working.
See, there’s been a lot in the news in the past few days. “Bob Woodward’s book”:http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743272234/ref=nosim/wadearmstrong-20, reports “debunking the administration’s optimistic view of Iraq”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/30/AR2006093000293.html, the revelation the “administration was warned about 9/11 back around 7/10″:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/30/AR2006093000282.html, complaints by the army that they’re “broke”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-military25sep25,0,5555967.story?coll=la-home-headlines and “stretched thin”:http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.special24sep24,0,3228806.story?coll=bal-home-headlines, and news we “may be losing in Afghanistan”:http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-afghan3oct03,1,2770102.story?coll=la-news-a_section, not to mention the breaking news about the “impending nuclearization of North Korea”:http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-10-06T184646Z_01_N04385691_RTRUKOC_0_US-KOREA-NORTH.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsHome-C1-topNews-3 and “Sudan’s threat to attack peacekeepers”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-darfur6oct06,1,5415744.story?coll=la-headlines-world&track=crosspromo sent to stem the genocide there; all of this is breaking and all of it points to the Bush administration’s inability to manage the international situation and provide for the national security of the US. We should be discussing how becoming involved in an optional war has deprived us of the troops we would need to win in Afghanistan and keep the Sudanese and Iranians in their places. We should be discussing how we’ve pursued a policy with North Korea that’s left us in a corner, just hoping that rogue state doesn’t go nuclear. We should be discussing how more Americans have died in Iraq than died on 9/11. We should be discussing how we still haven’t caught Osama. Those are all real issues.
Instead, we’re wondering if the pages were 16 or 17 or 18, Foley just flirted or if he touched, if someone should have done something earlier, if he’s gay or a pedophile or an alcoholic or a “Democrat”:http://davidfeige.blogspot.com/2006/10/bill-oreilly-labels-foley-democrat.html. That’s not a substantive discussion at all, and it’s probably not even important. In a few weeks, Foley will be forgotten, in some rehab center somewhere, and either the storm will have blown over Hastert or that corpulent individual will have resigned his House Speakership, and there will be another two weeks before the election in which the GOP can smear the Dems all over again.
So it’s a tempest in a teapot; and I think it was planned. The Republicans have kept Foley in their back pocket for years, knowing he’s just a scandal waiting to happen and knowing that he could be thrown to the wolves if they really needed to. Foley was their Plan C, the knowledge that they could distract the public if things went really badly even if the Dems hadn’t screwed up and even if their own party didn’t have any dirty tricks up its sleeve.
To keep their “get out of jail free card”, they let Foley stay in the House even after they made it clear they wouldn’t let him run for Senate. Rather than sending the already-outed man home, promising him the position of County Comptroller for the next 20 years if he would just leave Washington and spare the party from scandal, they kept him around but prevented him from advancing, knowing they’d maybe lose a House seat if they pulled that ripcord, but that it would only be a House seat, and at least that wasn’t a Senate seat.
So, they caught wind of bad news just a month before the election, and then threw (not so) poor Mr. Foley to the lions. And we all got distracted. In two weeks, all we’ll remember is that the Republicans are the party that’s tough on national security, the Democrats are cut-and-runners, oh, and maybe we’ll also remember that they’re for the gays and, hey, wasn’t there just some thing where some gay was into kids? So isn’t being pro-gay just like being pro-pedophile? Let’s not vote Democrat, honey, those pedophiles are disgusting.















Jackass Number Two: Smells Like Roses

October 4, 2006 / posted in Reviews / 4 Comments

There’s something special about watching a movie and knowing that, years later, you’ll be able to say “hey! I saw that movie when the people in it were still alive!” _Jackass Number Two_ is a hilarious oracle of coming disaster, a series of potentially-disastrous pranks all gone right. Now, a more-civilized individual might balk at breaking into riotous laughter at this Road Runner cartoon gone live-action, but not me, I loved it.
One nice thing about reviewing a movie like _Jackass Number Two_ is that there’s no plot to recap, just the boys doing their usual idiot things. Rocket-powered shopping carts, snakes of various types, doorbells rigged to airbags, drinking horse semen, it’s all there, just like we expected from _Jackass: the Movie_ and three seasons of _Jackass_ on MTV.
Wait, drinking horse semen? Yeah, they did, from a cup, although they had to put a black bar over the actual drinking, you know, so it wouldn’t appear to be a sex act. Because we could take it for one (one does suspect that maybe these guys are more interested in the sex acts of horses than in sex with women, both from the utter lack of females in the movie and because of the excess of men hanging around in tighty-whities together). But, really, _Number Two_ is a bit higher on the gross-out scale than the original, with a little more poop and puke than I really needed to see in a few more sketches than really needed them. Plus Johnny Knoxville bleeding profusely.
And Knoxville himself? In the past, he’d come off as a smart, good-looking guy who was maybe doing this for fun and to get his career started (I still don’t know why he hasn’t played the romantic lead in a movie, I’m sure the chicks would go wild). In this movie, however, we saw a little more of Johnny’s crazy side, and I think I can say with some confidence that he is totally off his rocker. The boy gets gored by yaks for fun, and he goads his co-stars into being blown up by anti-riot equipment, then sets them up to get slingshot-launched into closed loading bay doors. It may be the beer, it may be the pot (Bam, in particular, is colossally stoned in once scene), it may be having so many boys with so little total collective good judgement in one room, but something’s going wrong here.
Whatever that something is, I like it. Launched into the sky on an exploding rocket? Hidden pneumatic boxing gloves in hotel walls? Midgets and fat men, attached by bungee, falling from a bridge? It doesn’t get any better than this. Plan to spend ninety minutes laughing, and plan to wish there was at least another thirty still coming at the end. Which, I guess, means Jackass 3 is on its way. One is tempted to wonder how we will all respond when, in that film, bloody, dismembered limbs fly across the screen; I am pretty sure, however, that the victim/stuntman would have wanted us to laugh, just as we did here, both with them and at their stupid asses. Ha! Jackass.















The Embarassing True Story of the One Car I Loved

October 1, 2006 / posted in True Life Stories / 4 Comments

Dating California girls, I’ve really had the opportunity to appreciate how important car culture is in this state. It seems like all Califorians have a serious opinion of what their dream car is and a knack for spotting their favorite cars on the road. Myself, I grew up in what is “a somewhat less car-oriented town”:http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=11464, and I’ve never had the relentless California drive to have the greatest, best-driving, best-looking car of all.
Part of this is just that the two cities draw from different cultures. For starters, most of the people who could afford cars moved out of Baltimore; those who are left are apt to prefer either American muscle cars with big turbo intakes on the hood, or big American trucks with raised suspensions and even bigger tires (perhaps the Chevy plant that used to be in town encouraged the preference for domestic automobiles). I have no memories whatsoever of people with lowered cars, although I may just be revealing my whiteness here. The expensive customizations, the whining turbos, the ubiquitous tricked-out Asian rides… I just didn’t see them back home.
So what car did I dream of? I only had a fantasy involving a (non-flying) car once, when I was in second grade, when my father got a new car. At first, I loved that car; I imagined that it was the perfect ride for a gritty private investigator, and, of course, I imagined myself as that gritty private investigator. Clad in a brown fedora and trenchcoat, I’d travel the city solving crimes. Fortunately, I wouldn’t need air conditioning, because my father’s car didn’t have that, or an FM radio, because it didn’t have that either. This car’s light-brown exterior would match perfectly with my bearded face, and I’d drive it purposefully and aggressively around town as I crouched in its vinyl seats. Yes, that car was the only car I ever imagined myself owning, the only one I ever pretended I’d drive when I sat alone. It was great, the car of my dreams, that…
1983 Ford Escort L Hatchback?
“!http://www.escortfocus.com/assets/images/82Escort.jpg!”:http://www.escortfocus.com/html/history.html
That’s right, the only car I’ve ever dreamed of was an entry-level econobox with a 69 horsepower engine and absolutely no added options of any kind. And it was tan. No, clearly I don’t share the same car culture as my Californian compatriots.
Although I did have a bit of geek lust for that “second-generation Prius”:http://www.hybridcars.com/prius.html. Cleverness just turns me on.