What.

September 17th, 2008Blog3 comments

The BYU game: What the hell happened there? Fifty-nine to ZERO?! Someone said that this is the worst loss UCLA has experienced since the 1920s — back when it was a religious school for MEN. Back when “silversmithing” was a major. How on earth did this happen?

The problem with lying in commercials: When you deceive the public, you only deceive yourself. And you if you have to lie to win or lie to sell a product, you don’t deserve to either win or sell a product.

Lies breed lies. Making things subjective and jettisoning the bedrock of facts and the truth is a dangerous, slippery slope. It’s like stealing in front of your children — it teaches them to steal too.

For instance, in English class: “Your paper was poorly written.” “OH YEAH, PROVE IT! YOU CAN’T! I’m going to sue you!” In Math class: “This answer is wrong.” “NO IT’S NOT!” In Science: “These are dinosaurs.” “NO THEY’RE NOT!” At home: “You didn’t do these dishes properly.” “YES I DID, YOU CAN’T PROVE THAT I DIDN’T!”

It’s like poison gas in warfare: It does as much harm to the people who deploy it as it does to its victims.

The commercial I’m talking about, of course, is this one.

Brooke Shields extolls the virtues of German engineering in the VW Routan minivan. But that’s a goddamned lie — the Routan is just a rebadged Chrysler Town and Country.

Why must you turn my television into a box of lies, Brooke Shields?!

The fundamentals of our economy are strong: Oh good. I was worried what with the Dow falling five hundred points yesterday.

I’m on the UCLA campus a lot on the weekends. I get a lot of work done there.

Anyway, I’ve been seeing a lot more people collecting aluminum cans lately. As in A LOT more people. And these aren’t homeless people — these are regular looking folks supplementing their income.

So recently I’ve also been seeing families collecting cans on campus. Just this last weekend I saw a couple with a toddler in a stroller, digging in the garbage for aluminum cans. I’m pretty sure these people have jobs. I’m pretty sure that they’re not squeezing the welfare system (because if they were, they’d be sitting on their asses watching TV instead of collecting cans). No. They’re digging through trash, picking up soda cans because they have to.

That makes me fucking sad. What happened to our country?

Tech Support

September 15th, 2008Blog3 comments

So NBC shows are back in the iTunes store. This is a big plus for everybody involved. I don’t know why NBC decided to leave money on the table by pulling out of iTunes in the first place; Fake Steve Jobs claimed that it was because he said that NBC/Universal President Jeff Zucker looks like Homer Simpson.

You be the judge:

Anyway, I’m pretty gay for 30 Rock so I bought Season 2 on iTunes. However, for some reason two of the episodes are duplicates. So I sent an email in to iTunes tech support asking them to fix it. Here’s what I got back:

Dear MICHAEL,

I’m sorry to learn that “MILF Island” did not meet the standard of quality you have come to expect from the iTunes Store. I have submitted the item for investigation. Apple takes the quality of the items offered on the iTunes Store seriously and will investigate the issue with “MILF Island”, but I can’t say when or if the issue will be resolved. Please try again in a few weeks.

It makes me happy to see the phrase “MILF Island” used in an automated tech support message.

Very happy.

I finished writing my new project! I’m happy. It’s nice to have something new to work with.

Also I can celebrate with FOOD.

North, East, South, and West

September 10th, 2008Blog0 comments

They say that if you travel enough, eventually you will run into yourself. A good example of this was in the scenic route parking lot at Red Rock Canyon over the weekend: It was a bachelor party hike (feats of endurance and strength are now mandatory in bachelor parties), and we were just getting back from marching Rick — man of the hour — around the desert. And there in the parking lot was a man who looked just like Rick, except in his forties with a wife and kids and minivan. It was eerie, like a Star Trek:TNG time-space anomaly had opened and the two Ricks were seeing each other from across the great divide. There’s your future, Rick — or at least, a reasonable facsimile of it.

People have been asking me if I’m going to be traveling again soon. I was pretty happy to say “No, I’m staying put for a while.” I’ve been to Chicago twice and NYC twice as well this year. Up, down, over and around. But of course, now I’m being called back.

New York City: Going back in early 2009 for the Tribeca Film Festival. Chicago: Going back this winter. It’ll be nice to eat hot dogs when it’s cold. Plus maybe I can go to Weiner Circle after midnight when the yelling happens and have the staff refer to me as “Jackie Chan”. JACKIE CHAN WANTS A HOT DOG!!!

Plus there’s this: Cowboy Versus Samurai is coming to Hong Kong this winter for a few shows. Kind of like an exhibition game of football. Yeah, I’m as astounded as you are. More information to follow.

Wondrous

September 7th, 2008Blog1 comment

I spent the weekend in Vegas. Vegas is good, but I get Vegas’d Out really quickly.

My favorite part of the weekend was this hike we did through Red Rock Canyon. The mountains are beautiful. The pamphlet you got at the visitors’ center said that the whole region was once under water, thus causing the striations you see in the canyon layers as the iron oxidized.

The look of the rocks definitely had that underwater feel of cracked and jagged angles mixed with smooth surfaces. You get a sense of standing at the bottom of a drained ocean. You look up, see giant rocks that look like they belong in a sea monkey aquarium.

Vegas is cool. The food is fantastic, the drinks are expensive. I don’t gamble but I like watching people gamble. Strippers are crazy and they deserve their own post, so they will get one in the future — although that post will be about strippers in general because what happens in Vegas stays there, people.

One thing that I find really interesting from a nerd point of view is that Vegas contains the world’s biggest collections of giant indoor spaces. Well, maybe Dubai has more these days. But there’s got to be some kind of science to designing a casino/hotel/resort using a multidisciplinary melange of architectural, engineering, social and psychological concepts.

For instance, how far can the average American walk? That determines the maximum allowable distance between two points inside a casino structure. And I bet you that that distance is decreasing as the average American gets fatter. And holy smokes did I see some fat people this weekend.

One amusing thing I noted at the LV airport was that they had these tiled, painted murals of other cities on the walls, apparently done by school children. The mural of Paris featured the Eiffel Tower. The mural of Washington DC had the various monuments. All well and good.

Now, there was a mural of Minneapolis, Minnesota. And the kids were either unaware of any Minnesota landmarks or just didn’t look them up, so their depiction of it was generic and featureless. Although it did include this:

I didn’t know that one of Minneapolis’ prime features is the presence of fleshy four-tentacled blobs. What the fuck is that thing? Is that its head, or is it just happy to see us?

I think in any true graphical depiction of Minneapolis, your illustration needs to include a crowd of people eating various foods off of sticks.

Like I said in an earlier post, I like to read while I’m writing something new. This is what I’m reading:

A friend highly recommended Oscar Wao and I’m getting a real kick out of it. Any book about a fat teenage nerd that wants to grow up to design tabletop role playing games gets a huge thumbs up from me.

It’s also really cool to read about another culture. Oscar Wao concerns a Dominican family. I don’t know jack about Dominicans, but reading this book makes me like them very very much. It also fills you in on the history. It seems that cultures that are squeezed by dictators all end up having a lot in common. Everyone carries a wound that they either have to heal or find a way to live with.

Disaster

September 2nd, 2008Blog1 comment

With Gustav closing in, they chose the absolute worst weekend to open Disaster Movie. Either that or god is not a Disaster Movie fan.

Thinking about Disaster Movie and the other [Blank] Movies — I need to see them. I’ve heard all sort of horrible things about them but I haven’t seen them. I really should.

I loved Airplane! when I was a kid. I’m wondering if Airplane! is as bad as Disaster Movie is. They’re definitely from the same “parody” genre, but I have a feeling Airplane! is a far superior product. It does more satire than parody, and the jokes seem a lot smarter. Ted Striker’s drinking problem, for instance. That’s funny in a simultaneously smart-stupid sorta way. Disaster Movie/Epic Movie/etc. seem to just show characters from other, better movies interacting with each other and then getting hit by flying objects. That doesn’t seem as smart.

It occurs to me that the person that is the most effective at parodying/satirizing something is someone that fully understands and appreciates — and maybe even loves — the target that he/she is satirizing. The reason why Mystery Science Theater 3000 worked so well was that the writers of the show were such ardent sci-fi/horror/fantasy nerds. They understood the classics of the genres, understood pop culture, understood how movies were supposed to work. And if you don’t know enough about your target, you’ve got homework to do.

These [Blank] Movies just feel lazy. Incomplete. Like bits without punchlines. We shall see.