Help. Police. Murder.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is on the television right now.  I had forgotten how amazing Gene Wilder is.  Just absolutely fantastic.  The way he delivered the lines throughout the entire movie.  It blows Johnny Depp's performance away (and that was a great movie as well).  

And also how fucked up the oompa loompas are?  Seriously.   

Vacation plans for the future (insert John Williams music for effect)

Have You Ever by Incubus rocks the speakers.

Sifting through friends' trip pictures off of facebook really makes me want to take a vacation trip to some place not normal.  We have plans to go see Chuck up in Seattle in November (very excited, never been to Washington [state]).  I think I'll bring some explosives for some starbucks.  Thin them out a bit.  

We also have plans to go back home in February to see the new addition to the family (going to be born in October).  Those are the vacation plans for us so far.  But I want to take a trip for a week or so and visit some random state and just relax and take it all in.  Maybe take a trip to New York and piss on Yankee Stadium or to Boston and curse them for putting seats on the Green Monster (Biggest. Baseball. Mistake. EVER.)  Who ruins an iconic part of a stadium like that?  

Assholes.  

sleepless

Listening to Down by 311

I've been up way too long.  It's been close to thirty two hours.  I went and did inventory last night and it went well (for once, it seems).  The one bad thing about inventory is that I leave and have to turn around and come back in eight hours later.  That doesn't sound that bad, but it is just draining.  There isn't a whole lot of sleep in between leaving and coming back.  So I asked my boss if I could just stay for a double shift.  After a little bit of debating internally in her head, she agreed to it.  It was just about the best thing.  I got a shit ton of stuff done that normally wouldn't have been done.  It is amazing how much can get done when no one bugs you.  

So I was just exhausted while I was working.  My only thought was that I couldn't wait to get back to the apartment and sleep.  But I just wanted a nap, not a long sleep on the bed.  But I laid down on the couch and couldn't fall asleep.  And that is never an issue when I come home after a normal day.  It is odd.  So I can't wait until tonight so I can get some sleep back.  

Thrown off

I have to do a quarterly inventory tonight at work.  Every three months my whole sleep cycle gets a bit out of whack because of this.  You wouldn't think that one day of working at night as opposed to early in the morning would funk some stuff up, but it does.  Not only do I have to work late tonight, I have to turn around eight hours afterwards and go back.  

So I have been sitting around the apartment all day bored.  I've taken the trash out, done the dishes, watched a movie (Mad Max), and other small random tasks.  But I still have three hours before I go to work.  

This sucks.

College and movies

Listening to Best of the Left podcast.  Liberals so far left, they are almost right.

As A and I were watching an episode of Gilmore Girls (yeah, what of it?)  the daughter was going away to college.  It was all sentimental and emotional and blah blah blah.  As the episode played out, I tried to recall my going away to college.  I don't remember it be a huge deal.  I'm sure that my mom cried as they drove home.  Come on, her baby went away to college, how could she not?  I don't recall having a fear come over me.  I just started unpacking and meeting some people.  Not too exciting.  Anyway, the episode was almost cliched, but it was subtle, which is what I like about that show.  Looking back at moments in that show, you see things that happen because it is a show.  Plus the humor is extremely smart.  You really need to pay attention to the jokes.  

The other thing I want to tackle is movie endings.  Particularly the happy ones.  The good guys always win and the bad guys get theirs in the end.  Why is that?  I know that there are the movies where the bad guys get away and people get a bit disappointed.  Take, for example, the Blair Witch Project.  Hands down the best ending for a movie in the past fifteen years that I have seen.  To see that guy stand in the corner and the camera falls, classic.  I have two movies that would have been so much better had the ending been different.  And this is just for the sake of the bad guys out there.  For the pessimists who want to see the good guys fail.  You are welcome

First movie:  Star Wars:  A New Hope

Plain and simple, Luke misses his shot to blow up the Death Star, Vader shoots him down and the rebel cause is bitched slapped into oblivion.  The ultimate bad guys win, flying away laughing.  

People are probably screaming at me through cyber space, but think about it.  The hope was there to save galactic democracy and in one instant, gone.  Wow, it would leave a movie theatre silent.  

Second movie:  The Matrix

As opposed to Neo being brought back to life by Trinity (and it was at that point that the movies started their decline into crap) and him 'killing' Agent Smith, he stays dead, the Agents walk away, and the sentinels destroy Morphious and Trinity and the movie ends.  

End the movie that way and the other two (plus the Animatrix) don't get made and people don't get pissed about it.  But once again, it is the system beating down a group trying to stand up against them.  It would make for great cinema.  

With those two endings, ten movies get trimmed down to two.  

Mas Olympics

NO SLEEP TIL..................BROOKLYN!

The build up to the olympic games (either games, summer or winter) starts slowly and then gains a full head of steam about two weeks before.  The first week of the games are great.  Everyone is excited to watch the different events and see different competitions that aren't normally on the television.  I watched some water polo, some handball (dude, hardcore), badminton.  And then....meh.  

The excitement kind of goes away.  For me it was all about the swimming, as I had mentioned in an earlier post.  Afterwards, I could give a shit less.  Track and field is not exciting for me, nor is bmx biking (and by the way, how the hell did that become an olympic event?).  I tried to watch some track and field, and then realized that there seemed to be a million qualifying rounds for the one hundred and two hundred meter race.  I can only watch people run a straight line so many times before I get bored with it.  I admit, swimming also has qualifying rounds, but just one.  The more 'popular' races such as the fifty and one hundred free, and other one hundred races (butterfly for example) have qualifying, but it is just two heats...TWO.  The top eight of the sixteen get in for the final race.  That's it.  

And as cool as it was to see Usain Bolt break the world records in the one and two hundred races, they weren't very exciting.  He was so far ahead of everyone in the one hundred meter that he could have made a pot of coffee while waiting for the rest of them to cross the finish line.  That includes grinding the coffee beans first!  So not very exciting, and then you have the one hundred fly where Michael Phelps wins by one one hundredths of a second.  That is .001 seconds.

It takes longer to blink.  

An Irish look

My parents spent some time in Las Vegas not too long ago and I got a drunken call from my mom.  It made me so proud.  They took it upon themselves (most likely just my mom) to swipe some coasters from an Irish pub.  They know my love for Irish pubs.  I thought I would share a picture of the coaster because what is printed on it just absolutely rocks.  

Raise a glass to resistance.

Raise a glass to rebellion.

Raise a glass to re-order.

True mentality of the Irish nation:  drinking and rebelling.  classic.

new joy in life

A and I got our Mac today!  Very excited.  I can finally sit on the couch, watch TV, and surf the internet.  

The great American dream of slothiness (if it isn't a word, it is now).

Float tripping, swimming, and tracking

Listening to Anna Molly by Incubus.  

A and I got back from a mini trip today.  We went on another float trip to Missouri.  It was quite different from the usual one that we take.  Normally, it is floating for two days and camping along the river, which I do enjoy, but this time it was different.  We drove to Missouri and made camp and then the outfitter took us up river and we floated for the day down to the camp site and left the next day.  It was nice only having the cooler and one dry bag in the canoe as opposed to having everything for the weekend in the canoe.  There is less to lose if you do flip, which we did not thankfully.  The only problem with this float trip was that we were on the river for eight hours, which did make for quite a long day.  Six hours into the day, we were both ready to be done.  But it was nice to pull up the canoe and have the camp site all set up.  So it has it's pluses and minuses, as most things do.  

When we got home, I immediately tracked down the two recordings of Michael Phelps's last swims.  I just had to know if he got his last two medals.  I'm not going to lie, the one hundred meter butterfly really got my heart pumping.  My pulse was going as if I were back in the pool in high school.  I was so happy that the eyes of the world was on a swimming pool.  The best athlete in Olympic history (in my opinion) is a swimmer.  But that is also the problem, he is a swimmer.  Every four years swimming is brought to the forefront of the world during the Olympics.  The years in between swimming becomes irrelevant.  Listening to Jim Rome last week he had a discussion as to whether or not Phelps would be in the discussion of best athletes ever.  Names that come up in that discussion regularly are people like Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods, etc.  But Phelps won't get that kind of recognition because he is a swimmer and is only relevant every four years.  You can't make a professional league out of swimming, but to see the college championships broadcasted on ESPN would be great.  Honestly, they show the world series of poker on ESPN, so why not a real sport like swimming?

And now for something completely different:

The tracker that is attached to this blog gets archived every year.  So all the fun little red dots on the world map go away at the end of every August.  It is always great to look at that and see where people are when they stumble upon my writings.  This year, someone on every continent has looked at this blog.  The internet is universal and this is but a small, miniscule really, part of it.  But to think that at least once these writings have been read on every populated continent is pretty neat.  I'm not going to lie to myself and think that I'm popular over in Germany or Japan, but the thought that this at least came up on a computer screen somewhere other than in Kansas makes me smile.  

Experience V. Charisma

As of late, I have been using my ipod for the podcasts and not the music.  Even at work.  Any time the store is not open, employees are allowed to listen to mp3 players or cd players (for the thirty somethings) or tape players (for the forty somethings).  It is nice.  As long as you have only one earpiece in (for safety reasons).  It is nice of the company to allow that.  It makes the first two hours I'm at work go by quickly.  

One of the podcasts I came across was KCRW's Left, Right and Center.  It is a thirty(ish) minute political podcast where the host is very central on the political spectrum and there are two guest hosts (one who is liberal and one conservative.  Title make sense now?).  These aren't the crazies that you find on CNN or Fox News.  They listen to each other and give great insight into the topics that they cover.  Very mellow, very informative.  Very geeky as well, I suppose.  I got weird looks when people ask me what I was listening to.  

One of the episodes that I just listened to was broadcasted on the forth of July.  The main focus was on what the definition of patriotism is.  The obvious answer is the flag waving, support the troops, support the president, etc. etc.  However, the liberal host (her name is Arianna [not sure if that is spelled correctly]) brought up the point that patriotism can also be standing for what you believe in.  If you believe in protesting the current war, for example, that can be seen as your patriotic duty.  It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense at first, but after thinking about it, it does.  Protesting is a form of free speech and the right to assemble if you do so in a big or even large group.  Those two things are outlined in the governing construct that our country was based on.  

Another episode they cover why the two candidates are good candidates.  McCain has all those years of experience and Obama has a ton of charisma.  If you haven't heard it, try to find the speech he gave in Berlin.  It is fantastic.  It is a politician's speech I can listen to and not get bored.  So that leads to the question, which kind of man would you follow or possibly vote for?  An experienced man (with not a lot of charisma [in my opinion]) or a charismatic leader (with not a lot of experience).  It is an interesting point to think about.  

plays, smoking, and sports

Bulls on Parade is just starting...mmm, political anger.  

We went to see Les Miserables last night.  We went to dinner first with K&M and the four of us went to see it.  It was good, but long.  Very long.  Almost too long.  And I think that it has to do with the fact that it is three hours of singing.  I know, I know, it's a musical.  And that it covers a twelve hundred page novel.  And a couple of decades worth of French history.  And it did take a while to lay the ground work for the entire play, so the first thirty minutes or so went by slowly.  But overall, it was enjoyable.  It is nice to get out on the town and not go to a movie or to a bar, but to go see something like a play.  It amazes me the job that live actors do.  Very impressive.  

As I was leaving work yesterday I walked around the corner of the building and came across a few co-workers smoking.  Not a big deal, that is where they go, it is out of sight of people coming into the store, so that is good.  The one thing that bothered me was that one of them had just had a baby about three months ago.  At what point is it okay to smoke when you have an infant?  I just hope that she goes outside to smoke or smokes when someone else is taking care of the baby.  It all comes back to second hand smoke.  People know the danger of it, so hopefully she takes precautions about it.  

Brett Favre came out of retirement and was traded earlier this week.  For the past month or so, every single sports show that I watch had at least ten minutes devoted to the whole fucked up situation.  It just irritated the hell out of me.  And it wasn't just me who was irked by it.  I talk sports with a few co-workers and their thoughts and feelings were the same.  After he got traded, the only thing I thought was 'thankfully we won't have to hear about it anymore.'.  To the contrary, sports people are now dissecting every angle of the trade.  Who won who lost in the trade.  Who will do better as a team, etc. etc.  Once again, very irritating.  The trade is done, move on people.  

Macallan

The ipod is syncing at the moment...no music.

I finally busted into my bottle of scotch that I bought while we were down in St. Thomas.  A was complaining about the fact that it was sitting on the hutch for over a year.  I would buy some whiskey and drink that before I opened the scotch.  It is Macallan, twelve years old.  Finally, tonight, I opened it.  It sounded really really really good.

...and it was.  It is very tasty.  It makes me want to buy another bottle or two.