Wise Drivel

Elf -- the movie

Elf, starring Will Ferrel, is a very enjoyable movie. The story has a few holes, but it's a very entertaining (as well as clean) movie.

I'll try to post more regularly.

Oprah is an idiot

I got home a little early yesterday, so I had a little time to sit & hang out. I started surfing the TV, then I started flipping through the paper with the TV on some channel I wasn't really watching.

Then Oprah came on.

I know Oprah is the waelthist woman in the universe and supposedly the #1 pop culture icon that has ever existed, but I've gotta say it: she's an idiot.

Her guests were the cast of the latest Julia Roberts chick flick and her audience was full of college-age girls who acted like they typical preteen studio audience at a taping of "Saved by the Bell" in 1991. But that's not what made Oprah look like an idiot.

What made her look stupid were her questions. Chris Farley asked better questions of his guests on The Chris Farley Show on SNL. It was perhaps the most boring, shallow series of celebrity interviews I'd ever seen.

I've never really watched Oprah that much. I watched once when I was in college (over 10 years ago) and she struck me as a racist and sexist. Maybe it was just that one show, though. Either way, Oprah doesn't impress me much.

Note to David Letterman: Do you really want her to come on your show?

I have a room full of garbage in my house

My utility room is full of garbage. It's hard to get to the washer & dryer because of it. I'd like to just put it out by the street for the trash collection guys to pick up on Tuesday or Friday, but my wife won't let me. You see, to her it's not garbage.

I say it's garbage. Empty bottles & cans, cardboard, newspapers, jars, etc -- we used it, it's no good to us now -- it's garbage.

My wife calls it recycling. Apparently, recycling means saving your garbage until one of us (always me) has time to take it to Orange Grove & drop it off. Well, it used to.

I didn't mind loading the garbage into the back of my car and taking it at a time convenient for my schedule, usually after hours, and dropping it off. But now Orange Grove has a "no dumping" sign posted, which I'm pretty sure means they don't want me to leave my garbage there if they're not there to take it.

There are plenty of other places I can take the garbage, but they are way too picky about how they want it to be sorted, separated and labeled. I just want to get rid of the garbage that's piling up in my house. Don't they pay people to separate the stuff?

I hate recycling aluminum cans because it's better for the economy if I don't. If I throw my cans away like a regular person, some bum will come by and dig them out of the trash to take them to the recycling center to make a little money for himself. I figure that if I'm recycling the cans myself, I'm putting some poor bum out of work. And if a few bums are out of work because of me, the bum union will file a greivance and I'll be S-K-RUDE, buddy.

Interesting, scary article in TIME

I almost never buy TIME magazine off the newsstand. My dad subscribed for years and I peruse it in the dentist's office, but I rarely ever buy it.

I bought one last night because I wanted to read the cover story. If theology or Christianity interest you at all, this is a must-read for you.

These "lost gospels" are scriptures that are not in the current Bible because the church deemed them uninspired or even heretical in the early days. Many of the ideas these "scriptures" teach go way, way against what we know as Christianity, yet many people are now basing their spirituality upon them because they do not insist upon such "minor technicalities" as the virgin birth, ressurection, divinity of Christ, etc.

There's a name for this church. I call it the Church of the Holy Handbasket.

Check out the article at www.time.com

My son has antlers

We originally bought these for the dog.

Cute, huh?

Why do band uniforms look so stupid?

Marching band uniforms are the gayest looking things in the world (note: by "gayest" I mean that they look retarded, not that they look homosexual (note: by "retarded" I mean goofy, not legitimately intellectually diabled)).

Perhaps they are based upon military uniforms from bygone eras, but military uniforms have changed with the times. Band uniforms should too.

Most band members don't deserve the bad rap they get from the "cool" kids. Where I teach, I'd rather have a class full of band kids than any other subset of the high school culture. But it's hard to overcome the geek image when you have to dress like an idiot on Friday nights.

Look at the picture above. Does anyone think this looks cool? He's wearing a hat with a plume and a cape!

I went to a game at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville recently. Their drum major pranced around the field like an idiot dressed in his perfectly queer-looking costume (note: by "queer" I mean odd, not homosexual -- or maybe I mean homosexual. I mean, have you seen the way the guy prances up & down the field? Really!). I told my dad that I hope the kid is receiving some kind of scholarship for doing this, because there's no way I'd act like such an idiot in front of so many people for free.

Kind of like dressing like a super hero and correcting people's grammar on TV... umm, nevermind.

A Kid Rock Christmas?

Last night, as I was flipping channels right before bed, I saw the strangest thing on VH1:

Kid Rock singing.

Not the usual bellowing and screaming that so many people accept as music, but actually singing.

Well, actually it was country music so it doesn't fully qualify as singing.

But anyway, he was doing a duet with Leann Rhimes and the guy actually has a decent voice. Shocked the fool out of me.

Turns out it was his own Christmas special.

That's what we need, a Kid Rock Christmas special.

I doubt that Kid Rock can even spell Christmas, much less identify with its true meaning.

What better way to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ than to crank up some good ol' Kid Rock? Sounds good to me.

What we can do with Saddam now

Let's let him play Santa Claus. The beard is perfect.

Battlestar Galactica -- My Take

I just finished watching SciFi's remake of Battlestar Galactica. I taped it when it originally aired and watched it in bits and pieces as I had time. The VCR I used to watch it was different from the one upon which I taped it, so there were times when I really had to strain to hear them clearly. Wanna know what I thought of it?

The original Battlestar Galactica series came out when I was in 4th grade. I loved it then, as I was a huge Star Wars nerd at the time (kind of still am). The Cylons were cool, Starbuck was cool, Vipers were cool, The theme song was cool, and Baltar was one evil SOB. I know that there are certain people who know exactly what I mean when I mention "waggling."

So, SciFi Channel does a 4-hour miniseries remake. At first, I'm extremely excited -- kind of like when I first heard that "Phantom Menace" was in production. Then I saw a few promos and got myself ready to be disappointed. It seemed a little too edgy, like they were intentionally doing away with the campiness that made it so cool originally.

I knew going in that Starbuck was going to be a girl, so I accepted it rather painlessly. A female Boomer, though, totally threw me. I doubted Edward James Olmos' ability to play Commander Adama convincingly; he did nothing special with it. Any number of people could have played the part just as well, perhaps with fewer pockmarks. I wasn't expecting Lorne Greene, but I would have liked someone with a little more presence. It just so happens that EJO was the only name in the credits that I recognized.

At first, I was a bit lost. The glut of character exposition at the beginning of most epics usually leaves me reeling somewhat. The new Cylons showed up at the beginning and were pretty cool; kind of a mixture between the old Cylons and Arnold Schwarzzenegger's skinless Terminator. Unfortunately, they never spoke in that cool Cylon voice and they didn't show up again until the very end. Otherwise, they cylons were human looking. The main Cylon was a buxom blonde who seduced, then tormented Baltar.

Speaking of Baltar, he was less of an evil idiot traitor than the original Baltar played by John Colicos. This Baltar was a well-known computer genius who seems to have been tricked by the blonde Cylon into giving away all of the humans' defense network secrets. He was more of a reluctant villain. One thing I aways wondered about in the original series was: exactly what does Baltar do? I mean, he sits there in his elevated, revolving chair, with his arms high up on the armrests, lit from above, doing absolutely nothing until a Cylon Centurion comes in. He then spins in his chair, says something evil and creepy, and then does another 180 in his chair as the centurion says "By your command." Baltar's existence and relevance was far better explained on SciFi.

I liked the way they didn't go totally futuristic with it. Aside from the whole space-travel and cyborg thing, their technology wasn't too far removed from ours. People still did a lot of things by hand (which you don't see a lot of on Star Trek), and it was a very believeable extrapolation of current warfare techniques into a more advanced time. There were no lasers, but plenty of souped-up versions of modern weaponry -- bullets, shells, nukes, etc.

It took me awhile to get used to the characters all having normal-sounding names. Apollo was "Lee," Starbuck was "Kara," and the names by which I knew them were actually their call signs (like Maverick and Goose). They had last names too, with Apollo being called "Lee Adama," which makes sense, since he is Commander Adama's son. It just took some getting used to because it was different. Baltar, by the way, was named Gaius (like from Planet of the Apes).

The characters were as human as any of us and had to deal with many common human thorns in the flesh. Father and son Adama were estranged, there were disputes among the personnel, etc. It was a much more realistic picture of a real human society, not the sterilized version we usually get.

I liked the way they told the story. Conflicts that were never considered in the original story arose appropriately and we got to watch the characters deal with them in a very natural way. They explained things well, and by the end I would have been disappointed if they had delved into some of the silliness of the original show. I don't know why they bothered to introduce Boxy; he didn't do anything and was daggit-less. I guess that's a good thing, though.

At the end, when they bring up Earth, I found myself wishing they would say Earf like Tracy Morgan's "Astronaut Jones." Maybe next time.

All in all, I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. I was fairly engrossed. The fight sequences were good and they seemed to pay heed to many oft-ignored laws of physics in Science Fiction.

As for the differences between this miniseries and the original series, I'd say they are analogous to the differences between the Batman series from the 60's and the Batman movies of the 90's. On second thought, maybe Battlestar Galactica was remade better than Batman.

If you were a fan of the original series, or have been watching it on SciFi lately, I think you would enjoy this remake. It's a grittier, realer update -- more than the soap opera I was expecting. And it ended fairly well.

What did you think?

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

I hate seeing those words alone in the middle of a page. What a waste.

And if you think about it, the fact that those words are printed on the page means that the page was not, in fact, left blank after all.

Morons.

The only movie that ever made me cry

Snoopy Come Home.

Second grade.

I cried like a girl on PMS with a mentally abusive boyfriend.

I cried like a Baptist woman giving her testimony at the Sunday evening service.

I cried like like a stoner who realizes he's just eaten the last twinkie in the box.

I cried the tears of a boy who has just faced the harsh reality of an animated beagle and his return home to a weird round-headed kid.

No other movie before or since has ever effected me like that.

Sometimes for fun I ask my wife to explain the plot of Old Yeller. She hasn't made it all the way to the end without losing it yet.

Food that dissolves

Do you like food that dissolves? I do.

Funyuns is an example. Funyuns dissolve as soon as you put them in your mouth. They are mostly air, and you can eat a whole bag of them without ever swallowing once. Then when you're done you have a mouth full of Funyuns residue.

Munchos are very similar. A diet of Munchos and Funyuns would be cool, because you could eat entire bags of salty snacks and only swallow about a teaspoon of actual matter.

Popcorn is similar, but its semi-solid core keeps it from dissolving as completely as Munchos or Funyuns.

Sprint users beware!

My wife and I switched our mobile phone service to Sprint back at the end of September. We get unlimited Sprint-to-Sprint calls, which is good for us because everyone else on both sides of our family uses Sprint as well. We got 2 phones, sharing 500 minutes, and feel like it's a good set-up for us.

Except that it's Sprint.

You know, the phones that lose their signal every time a butterfly flaps its wings.

And Sprint is underhanded and greedy. Not that this makes them different from every other business in the world, but they are.

For example: When we signed up with Sprint, they seemed grateful to have us as new customers. So grateful, in fact, that they said they would give us 3 introductory features free for 2 months. These features (wireless web, voice commands, and one other that escapes me at the moment) usually cost $5 per month, but they said we could have them for free for 2 months. Fine.

For 2 months we got our Sprint bill. It showed us being charged $5 apiece for each of the three features, then it showed three $5 credits, making the features free.

We never used any of these features. We didn't ask for them, didn't want them, and certainly didn't want to pay for them. And for two months, we didn't.

Then we got our next bill. It included the three features, each coming with a $5 charge, and no credits.

My wife called customer service to have the charges removed. Almost every other company we have dealt with over the years has been willing to work with us in matters like this, but not Sprint. They refused to erase the $15 worth of charges, even though she explained that these were features that we did not ask for and that we never used. She cancelled the three features immediately, but it was too late to keep us from having to pay for them this month.

I know it's only $15, but it's the principle of the thing that kills us.

My wife told them that she was embarassed to be a Sprint customer and that they were greedy SOB's. Well, maybe she didn't call them SOB's. But she gave it to them with both barrels.

They also told us when we switched out service over that they could also switch our home long distance service to Sprint and it would be free. That's what he said. Free. All of our long distance from our land line at home. Well, as it turns out, it's only 50 minutes. Fortunately, we don't use it that much any more.

Anyway, Sprint users, HEED MY WARNING!!

Look at your bill every month. Be sure you inquire about any charges that seem strange. Be sure to cancel any "promotional" services that you do not wish to keep. Finally, be sure to tell them that you heard they were greedy, underhanded SOB's.

If you are considering switching to Sprint, make sure you read the contract before you sign it. This may be difficult, because they ask you to sign it before they print it out. Then, when they DO print it out, it's on that shiny, fax-looking receipt tape. You know, the stuff that fades to the point of unreadability after about 2 weeks. Mind you, this is a 2-year contract.

Anyway, watch out when dealing with Sprint. They are greedy, sneaky, devious bastards and all they care about is separating you from your money.

But I'm not bitter.

Battlestar Galactica

If you're around my age, you remember how awesome Battlestar Galactica was. I've been really excited about the remake, a 2-parter that aires last night and tonight on Sci-Fi.

I don't know whay I'm so excited; it won't be the same. For some reason, people have come to demand much edgier fare in their entertainment and won't stand for campy scripts with bad special effects anymore. Now it all has to be a soap opera.

I taped part I last night. I will tape part II tonight and watch them when I have time. I look forward to it, but am preparing for disappointment. They just don't make 'em like they used to.

My favorite part of Christmas

Many people love Christmas for many different reasons. Some people like the shopping, some like the decorations, some people like the music, some enjoy the religious significance, others enjoy the parties and time spent with friends and family.

I like the commercialism.

I believe that Christmas is all about playing on peoples' emotions and guilt at the holiday season to make them spend as much as possible.

I particularly enjoy the way we are led to believe that everyone somehow deserves to receive a bunch of gifts at Christmas. The advertisers have us thinking that we are horrible friends, parents, neighbors and family members if we don't run out and buy stuff for everyone we know. TV commercials guilt us into doing it. We feel bad if someone gives us something and we fail to reciprocate.

It's a marvelous opportunity to observe the mass manipulation of the human psyche.

I can't wait to hit the mall!

Matrix Reloaded: 2 Much for Half a Movie

Now that Matrix Revolutions had been out for a little while, I finally got around to renting Martix Reloaded last weekend. Without further ado, here's the very last review of it you'll see:

Too much fight scene.

Too much freeway chase scene.

Too many people in the cast.

Too much Zion.

Too much stylized special effects.

Too many albino rastafarians (I'm still not sure what they were supposed to be).

Basically, the producers said, Hey, here's what worked in the first movie. Let's take all those elemets and crank them up to eleven for the second one. It made me tired.

Then, at the end, you find out you spent all that time and money on half a movie -- just like the end of Back to the Future 2. I can't help but think that if they'd refrained from using up two thirds of the movie on fight scenes and freeway chases, they could have finished the story in this one movie. I guess they know a cash cow when they see one.

Piano Reeves acts as though he dropped a chromosome somewhere and spends the rest of the movie looking for it (Sluggo, 1995). Carrie Anne Moss looks like a man from the neck up. Morpheus is one of the coolest movie characters ever. Lawrence Fishburne does a nice job with him, but it made me uneasy when he preached.

The first movie told a very good story. Quite innovative. The second one milks it dry.