Batman Begins

Two early pictures of the Batmobile from the new Batman Begins film.

Interesting. I'm glad that there's no bright neon colors.

TV Tuesday

Oh, Get Real!

Reality TV is everywhere, love it or hate it. From Survivor to My Big Fat Obnoxious American Idol - Oh, sorry, there are too many to keep track of!!! So do tell- what's your take on the topic???

1. Do you consider yourself a "fan" of reality TV? I don't know if I'd say I was a fan, but I've seen quite a few of the shows.

2. What's your "can't miss" reality TV show (or shows)? It was Last Comic Standing and Tough Enough, but as both of those are off air right now I don't really have one.

3. What reality TV show do you suppose the devil plays on the TV in Hell as punishment? The Apprentice. I don't know what people see in that one, I thought I'd stumbled onto some wierd-ass survivor in New York when I flipped over to it. I just didn't find any of the people I saw on it anything other than vapid and soulless. Sorry.

~Bonus~ If you were given a free ticket to be on any reality show, which one would you choose? The Jerry Springer show, because I's gots me some secrets to tell, and sometimes they gots the dancin and the flashin, and that Steve fella seems awful cool.

Grace, ellegance, a fat man about to land hard on his face. Just another day in the wonderfull world of Sumo. The best part is I don't see anyway that either of these guys didn't come out in a world of hurt and with possibly very broken faces.

Incidentally, the guy in the back doing the throwing is named Awesome Asashoryu, the Magnificent Mongolian.

If that's not the best wrestler name ever, I don't know what is. (Probably Bill Ding the evil architect)

Asashoryu should try out for the Rockettes with a high kick like that.

Also take a look here, and look at the guy on the right. There's a dirty, dirty joke involving his pose and the black, stringy tendrils hanging down from his diaper and how that looks, but I'm not going to make it here.

Truck's Illumination

This is the first section of the first draft of the novel that I'm working on. It'll probably get backed up further in the book, but it's being told from the point of view of Francis 'Truck' Murdock, a big, ugly, stupid stock hero type. Imagine Ron Perlman after being punched repeatedly in the face (Ron Perlman, not you), and He's a combat magician and he kills the vampires and other creatures of the night. He's telling the other lead character about how he came to be the brow-beating zombie killer that he is.

I figured that since I haven't posted anything substantial in awhile, I'd put this up.

Be warned there's some rough language and crude sexuality for all you sensitive types (you know who you are,a nd I know that's a prime selling point for some of you others), so don't be shocked if you read any further.

Now if I can just string through some of the other pieces into something cohesive.

1.

So I was at this titty bar, right. Rick's Gold Bar.

Really it was more like a whorehouse, and I'm not too proud to admit that. Sometimes I get lonely for company, you know. With a face like this, it's hard talking to women without them running away or calling the cops, and sooner or later you just decide to pay for it to get rid of the hassle.

Now this was back before I took up the crimefighting, and before I'd seen my first vampire and whatnot, and I still went to those types of places from time to time. And it was before I met Pammy. I'd appreciate it if you don't mention this little escapade with her, by the way. What she don't know about this won't hurt her.

So I was at the titty bar, at the actual bar. Out in the front it was just like any other titty bar, with a couple of stages with poles, and there was a girl dancing on the end of the bar. I'd been there for awhile already and had had a few, and I was sizing up this girl wavin her cooch over me and rubbin her tits in my face and I'm getting up the nerve to talk to her about going upstairs. That's where they had the rooms where you and the girls could, you know.

I'm havin to work up the nerve, cause even with the sure things, I'm still a bit on the shy side, and there's always the chance that I'll still be turned down, cause I'm not exactly the safest looking type, but that's neither here nor there.

So like I said I'm sizin up this redhead who's shaking her stuff in my face. I'm looking from her snatch in front of my eyes up to her tits, then down to her shoes. They're these high heeled silver jobs, and she's dancin real careful like, so as not to knock over the bottles at her feet. The music's pumping pretty hard, but none of that techno or pop shit. No, this is real music. The girls here, they strip to Stevie Ray, or sometimes they'll put on something heavier like some Bon Jovi, or Kiss, but right then it was Stevie Ray singin "If this house is a rockin." And I was starin up at that perfectly formed cooch with a tiny little landing strip of red hair above it, when this real loud banging started from upstairs. Loud enough to be heard over the music.

I'm thinkin, somebody's really giving it to one of the girls--it was that kindof banging you know. And there's real loud fuckin sounds and yellin and moanin like in a porno, only turned up to the top volume on the tv and it just keeps getting louder and louder and pretty soon the girls have all stoped dancing and and we're all just staring up at the ceiling and listening to this loud fuckin.

You could tell that they were gettin towards the end and it got more and more frantic, and Stevie's singing "Don't bother come on in" and then there's this big flash of light. I'm not really sure how, but it's like the whole place was just lit up with sunlight and it was pulsing all these colors and for a minute it was blindin and I couldn't really hear anything at all except those two coming upstairs and all this bright light. It was like when you black out, only with whiteness, and warmth and things like that.

It was a good feeling, and when I came back to myself I realized that I had came in my pants and I was a little embarrassed by where I was and what I had done, but I seemed to be the only one that was.

The redhead whose snatch I'd been eyin before was quickly comin in for a landin on my face. She had this weird half lustful half dreamy look on her face, at least she did for the couple of seconds that I could she threw herself on me.

Now I'm not one to turn down a freebie when it knocks, but I was feelin like somethin really weird was going on, and I struggled just a little, maybe not too hard, but I was able to get away just the same, I saw that everyone around me in the bar were just goin at it like they was in heat or something. The bartender was doing something unnatural to a ladies shoe, and there were lots of combinations of people going at it that I'd rather not think about. It was like I'd accidentally rented an all ugly bi-male-male-female gangbang tape. It wasn't really a pretty sight, except for some of the girls.

I'm seein all this, and this redhead is trying to get my belt undone and she has her legs all wrapped around me and isn't lettin me go, you know. To tell you the truth it was about that time that the thought of the freebie overwhelmed the weird feeling and I just decided to go with it. She was wanting it and I was wanting it more than a little, so I just went ahead and went with it.

Just about the time she's gotten my pants down around my knees there's a big commotion behind me, besides all the fuckin, and I hear, "Nobody move. This is the police. You are all to cease and desist from all sexual activities."

I look up from the top of red's head and into the mirror behind the bar and see that there are these three guys in black suits and sunglasses comin through the door all purposefull and rigid (but not rigid like the rest of us, if you know what I mean, or maybe they were). They've got these little toy-looking submachine guns held up in the air, and one of them grabs this little hairy guy who's going to town on another guys face who was having his way with one of the strippers in a scene that I'd rather not remember, and he throws this guy back against the wall hard enough to splinter the wood there, and the little hairy guy just crumples down the wall leavin a wide streak of blood behind.

Another one of the suited guys kicks one of the strippers square in the chest and she goes tumblin off in a corner. The other one is just movin his head back and forth like he's looking for somebody and I let out a little sigh of relief when he passed over me and the redhead, who's making it hard for me to concentrate if you know what I mean (she hadn't exactly stopped what she was doin, neither had most of the others, even after the suits started getting rough).

I've got my hands up, and red's workin on me, and I'm watching this center suit in the mirror as he looks back and forth real slow, then he reaches up one hand and puts it to his ear like when an anchor gets somebody talking to him from the booth, and he starts for the stairs. The other two flank him and kick at anybody in their way. Which stops most of the fucking that's going on, but not all of it.

I wonder how the suits found out about the orgy so quick, but I figure they had the place bugged or something and I watch em go to the bottom of the stairs. About this time the bouncer decides to play the macho man and ask for the suits IDs.

The lead one takes his gun and smacks the guy across the face with it and I see some teeth and blood fly out and his jaw and hid nose breakd with a big crack and he goes down in a lump to the side of the stairs and that's the last anybody says about any ID as the three of em go upstairs.

Signs

The sign on my High School Alma Mater yesterday was promoting the "Moo Alpha Theta Regional Conference" being held I don't remember when.

I think something is wrong with the sign, unless they've changed the direction of Mu Alpha Theta, or there is some form of alternate acceptable spelling of the Greek Alphabet that I don't know about.

Random Thoughts

Watched my first what I assume is new episode of the Simpsons in a long time on Sunday. I thought it was quite good. Homer the Coward vs. the Bear, of particular brilliance were lines such as these:

Homer: Choke on your candor!

...

Marge: Homer, there's no rear in that thing.

Homer: I know, but if I get really scared I don't want to ruin the suit.

...

Homer: Why does a bear need a crowbar?

I also liked the Sprawl*Mart parody, with Abe as a greeter. I also found it quite ironic that there was a Wal*Mart commercial that ran after that segment.

Caught an episode of Wonderfalls, and enjoyed it as well. I don't know if they can keep up the cynical, clerks mixed with religious seeking tone while set in a Niagra Falls gift shop, but it'll probably get cancelled long before they are forced to jump the shark anyway.

Rented The Rundown and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the film. I think it was a much better showcase of the Rock's abilities than The Scorpion King. The inclusion of the Rock Bottom in the bar fight scene was just as cool as the standing suplex in the fight scene in They Live. I just hope that hollywood gives Rocky more opportunities like this one. Chris Walken was excellent as well.

Rented Gothica--another good Dark Castle film. Not overly great, but quality performancs and a bit of mystery that sortof left you guessing if you weren't paying attention overmuch.

There are a whole lot of Ladybugs around the place here, only a few are making it inside so far, but I imagine that the number is going to go up as Spring progresses.

Found a Mr. Men book here on one of the shelves, Mr. Silly to be exact, hadn't thought about them in quite some time, but I remember them quite fondly from my childhood, almost as much as the Sweet Pickles books.

Reading Swifter than eagles : Bill White and the battle of Athens, found it in my Grandmother's books. I'm about half way through and it's reasonably well written. I enjoy reading a book peppered with history of my home town and written with alot of local language (Esperanto). I've found a few typos in the book, such as repeated paragraphs and a couple of misspelled words, and I don't think that Superman ever wore a mask in the old serials like it says in the book, but on the whole it's largely entertaining and informative. I doubt you'll ever see a copy since it's locally published, and the edition I have is signed and numbered, but if you find it and have a taste for regional historical non-fiction novels, then go for it. Read a summary of the 1946 Battle of Athens.

Also in my grandmothers books I found a book on New Math for Parents from 1965, as well as a guide-book for physical education for elementary schools in Tennessee from 1962. I'm looking forward to reading both.

That's all for now.

Heating

In the house here heat is provided by a gas powered wall unit that has an open flame behind a grill with a heating coil that it lights up. It's in the kitchen behind the head of the table. When it comes on it flames up and as I was sitting here I noticed that the flames come out to just outside the grill when it does that.

Now, those who know me know how I am, what with the flatulence and all. The point of all this is that I'm very carefull not to let one go in the kitchen, especially near the heater. I'm worried that I'll blow up the whole house if I'm not carefull.

Just thought you'd like to know.

TV Tuesday

1. Which TV doctor would you choose to remove your appendix? The Doctor from Voyager, for much the same reason as Tommy's response of Beverly Crusher, except he's a hologram and Robert Picardo.

2. Which TV doctor would you not let touch you with a 10- foot pole? Carrie Weaver, even though she probably means well.

3. Which TV doctor/hospital would you choose for the best medical care? General Hospital, because you can come back from things like coma and whatnot with no ill effects, and everyone is always so nice and pretty and I bet they smell nice too.

~Bonus~ Everyone knows nurses run the hospital. Who was/is your favorite TV nurse? Kes from Star Trek Voyager. Terrible show, especially after she left.

Moved In

I'm pretty much moved into my new place, but my phone still isn't hooked up yet, so I'm not able to check the net except sporadically at my parent's house.

Started the new job last night and everything seems to be going well.

Hopefully regular communications can resume on Monday (since three days until hooking up my phone seems to mean six days to the phone company).

Hope he doesn't see those copies of Battle Royal

Man dressed as the devil disrupts ‘Passion’ movie

Moviegoers at Country Cinemas in Evansville attending a showing of “Passion of the Christ” got more than they bargained for Saturday night.

They were greeted in the lobby of the theater by a man wearing a ‘red devil’ costume. Tyler Wendell, a 19 year old freshman at the University of Southern Indiana, caused quite a ruckus with his get-up. The audience, many who were part of church groups, was visibly upset by the antics of Wendell.


”I always like to push the limits,” Wendell said. Many were upset that Wendell chose to wear a devil costume to a religious movie. Many patrons jeered Wendell as he stood in line for concessions.

Once inside the movie, Christians began pelting Wendell with Gummy Bears, Ju-Ju Bees, and popcorn. Management got involved after a 75-year-old woman, Hazel Meyer, poured a 64-ounce Coca-Cola on Wendell.


I had a similar idea that I shared with co-workers. Mine involved dressing as Jesus though. I wonder how they would react to that? Maybe I could come dressed as Jesus and someone else could come dressed as the devil and we could have a big fight out in the lobby or in front of the screen during the movie?

pol·y·u·re·thane

Don't know how many of you are sports fans out there and might have seen this, but take a look at
The 20-question final exam that Jim Harrick Jr. gave to students in his Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball course in the fall of 2001.

If this is all you need to know to be a basketball coach, then sign me the hell up. Apparantly this was the only test of any sort given in the class, taken by some of the players on the team Harrick coached.

If you're only going to give one test in the entire semester, don't you think that you'd have time to proof it pretty carefully?

This reminds me of my glorious two semesters of bowling I took in college. Our teacher had a real hard-on for making the class a serious class and not just a throw away P.E. requirement. We had lectures and were required to keep notebooks with various crap in them.

The best part was the final. It was the only PE class I ever took that had an essay question. I don't remember the question, but I do remember Tommy's consternation and anger over being penalized for misspelling polyurethane.

Moving on up to the east side

My updates have been a bit sparse as of late because I'm getting ready for a move. With the packing and taking care of job considerations and whatnot, I haven't been online that much in the last week or so.

Hopefully by the middle of next week I'll be settled into my new place and I'll get back to my semi-regular updates.

Cartoon Themes

Do yourself a favor and have a listen to the Sub-Mariner theme song from the 1966 'animated' series

Quite possibly the greatest television theme song ever written, outside of the theme from Branded.

After that take a listen to other themes at CBR's theme page.

I'm also especially fond of the themes from:

Pryde of the X-Men
The Tick
Thor
and The Hulk

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School of Rock

Family Business episodes 1-4

Henry Rollins: Live at Luna Park

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Club Dread
IMDB entry

The thing that I came out of this movie wanting the most is a cd of Coconut Pete songs. I don't understand why there aren't any on the movie soundtrack. [if anybody finds any .mp3's out there let me know]

Pete [Bill Paxton] is patterned after Jimmy Buffet, but comes off to me as more of Ozzy Osborne crossed with David Lee Roth, spaced out, balding, but still clinging to that rock-star wardrobe. He owns a resort on an island where he and a crew of oh-so-pretty ones take in guests for week long parties, complete with Pete concerts, ghost stories around the campfire and life size pac-man.

Then a machete wielding maniac starts killing them off one by one.

Most of the time movies with a plot like this are unintentionally funny, but the Broken Lizard crew toe the line with a film that works as both a screwball comedy and a bad 80s horror film. Imagine a Police Academy Two crossed with a Friday the 13th, and you get the idea.

This isn't a sight gag comedy, or a gross out comedy, but more of an older style one where there are actually set-ups for jokes and lulls in the comedy and the action, rather than constantly throwing as much crap at the wall just to see what sticks. I imagine the problem lots of online reviewers have had with the film is because they've been conditioned by one too many Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider film to expect every comedy to have to center around a too zany character mugging for the camera and an abundance of reaction shots to said mugging.

There's not really any of that here. What you have are offbeat characters placed in extraordinary circumstances, much like Cabin Fever, but with lower intensity horror [this is a comedy after all].

The story is nicely and simply set up, and works to give pretty much every major character motive and opportunity to be the killer up to their eventual bloody death.

The ensemble cast works great here, with everybody getting in some good lines and no one working to overshadow anyone else. It's obvious that the Broken Lizard guys know each other's strengths and weaknesses.

Good over the top horror spoof. Fans of Super Troopers won't be disappointed.

Where's that Finger Going?

I found this by way of Drudge a few days ago and forgot to save where he borrowed it from, but that's all beside the point. This pose is meant to imply serious thought, but I think it's just a cover.

My Masterpiece in the Making

I bring to you my opening shot across the bow of cinema, the first part of my work in progress Dance of the Peeps [.wmv file under 200k] part 1.

The music, by Daler Mehndi is a temp score, and hopefully as the work progresses I will be able to add something suitable.

Enjoy and fear the continuation.

Elmore Leonard on Writing

Found this awhile back, but I've been slow with the posting lately.

Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle, by way of BoingBoing.

I especially like:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.

New Direction Same as the Old Direction

In an effort to further destroy the struggling market for anglophile comics it seems the new bigs over at Marvel Comics have decided that kid friendly is the way to go with their comic books, what with this return to good old-fashioned do as you are told morals that our country is apparently yearning to return to [what with frightful breasts being shown on the television and all].

The exceptions to this rule are looking to be the Marvel Knights and Max lines, which I would assume are going to be treated as something like teen and adult imprints respectively.

They've already dropped Igor Kordey from Excalibur because his style just isn't what they are looking for.

It seems that they want to return to the old fashioned super-hero costume look, and return to simple moral stories without any real emphasis on thought or content. The house of ideas has officially decided that they are to return to the old ideas.

There are also rumblings that they're wanting to return to the 90s style promotional covers with super-rare variant this and chromo-that, because, you know, the collector's are where the money really is, as the 90s showed. Here, they've let the so-called 'readers' dominate the market for a little while, and what do they get? Drops in sales, and critical acclaim. You can't build an audience with critical acclaim, now can you?

Not when you can't get that much critical acclaim with Chuck Austen writing half your books.

I have an idea for them. Here's what they can do to drive down the cost of all this hooptedoodle. What you do is, you hire artists to just draw big splash pages as covers. All the variant's you can imagine in all the different colors. Then you fire all the writers and editors and what-not, all the useless people. You take all those issues of Darkhawk and whatever else you have laying around over at vault-marvel and you print up new covers with all those drawings you had the guys do.

Then you just put the new covers over the old ones.

Now here's the really good part.

You seal this in one of those slab-plastic containers and grade the book really highly, but with the constraint that if the slab is opened [you could just as easily make it unopenable] all the value of the book is lost. Maybe it could burst into flames or turn immediately to ash or something.

Don't let anyone in on what is actually in the issues, because that would spoil everything.

Now sell those puppies and watch the dollar's fly in.

It's a win-win for everybody.

I think the comics world would have been better off if Marvel had just closed up shop and sold all of its holdings when they filed for bankruptcy. They obviously don't know what they want, and don't understand that the reason for flagging sales and general apathy towards mainstream comics is that they've lost hold of the market and most people just don't care anymore.

Why should they care, comics are just for kids anyway.

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Once Upon a Time in Mexico

Satan's Cheerleaders

WWE Royal Rumble 2004

The Contender