The political blog is coming…
I know I said earlier that I would stay away from politics here, but recent events in my life and in the news have got me all riled up. Coming this week I’ll be starting a political blog that will catalog my opinions and provide anecdotes from my (potentially) new job with a democratic grassroots campaign.
For now, though, I urge you to read about the cost of the Iraq War. I don’t know the pain of losing a friend or family member to violence, and the true cost of pain due to lives lost couldn’t possibly be measured. What can be measured, however, is the cost in dollars of the war in Iraq. I was furious to hear that 10 to 15 billion dollars had been spent on this war that no one can seem to justify…Imagine how furious I was to hear that it wasn’t 10 to 15 billion dollars total, but 10 to 15 billion dollars a month is spent by our government on the war. I don’t think I can really comprehend that amount of money, but here is one way to look at it…
…if next month, we spent the 10 billion dollars elsewhere, we could:
- Pay the yearly salaries of 200,000 elementary school teachers (at a generous, yet well-deserved $50,000 a year contract)
- Hand out 1 million $10,000 scholarships
- Open more than a thousand elementary schools (at a middle-of-the-road $9 million a pop)
- Pay the yearly health insurance premiums of 2.1 million people (at the average rate of $4000 a person)
- Help the World Bank bring food to impoverished people (Recently, the World Bank has asked for donations from richer countries to help the third world deal with rising food costs. Their goal is to raise $500 million total. We could satisfy that goal 20 times over by ourselves if we donated one month of Iraq war spending.)
…and the list goes on. Think of it this way (watch how I bring it back to an entertainment industry blog post). The most expensive movie ever produced was the latest Pirates of the Caribbean at approx. $300 million. Bruckheimer could’ve produced 33 Pirates movies in one month! Think of all the swashbuckling action we are missing out on! Hell, you could produce all of the top 50 most expensive movies and then buy all of the premium advertising time during the Super Bowl to advertise those movies and still have money left over. And that’s just with one month’s worth of Iraq War spending!
Don’t let it bring ya down, Barack…
Full post to come later, but I’ve got to say one thing real quick…
Barack, I know you read my blog everyday before you go out on the stump to make your speeches. I really appreciate that. I just wanted to let you know that I still love ya’ no matter what people are saying. Keep preachin’ brother.
Hypemachine & Muxtape…
Cool Music Site o’ the Day #1: The Hype Machine
I get most of my music these days off of one of the two billion music blogs that are up and running around the webs. “Wouldn’t it be great,” I sometimes think, “if somebody would invent a machine that would search the blogosphere for me and find new music?” Well, somebody did, and it’s called The Hype Machine. It scans hundreds of the most popular music blogs to see what the kids are talking about these days. Plus, you can type in the name of an artist and it spits out links where you can download songs by that artist for free.
Cool Music Site o’ the Day #2 – Muxtape
This site is pretty self-explanatory and also very awesome. Just go through the two second sign up and start making your online mixtape. You can use any mp3’s you have on your computer and order them how you please and that’s pretty much it. Simplicity rules at Muxtape right down to the simple site design. Browse a randomly generated assortment of muxtapes or go directly to a favorite. Here’s mine. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it and there’s no real theme. Just a random sampling of stuff that’s caught my ear lately.
Pearl Harbor, National Treasure…John McCain?
I try to keep the politics out of this blog (and indeed, you may see me running two blogs sometime soon. This one for entertainment, another for politics) but this story seems to fit here.
I was on the Washington Post website looking at campaign donors. Barack Obama has dozens of what the Post deems “noteworthy donors.” Among them are Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Zach Braff, James Brooks, Tyra Banks (“Barack…you are still in the running…to becoming America’s Next President”) and Will Smith.
Similarly, Hilary Clinton has an equal number of “noteworthy donors” with support from Danny DeVito, Christopher Guest, Hugh Hefner, and John Grisham (Imagine a project produced by Hef, written by Grisham, directed by Guest, and starring DeVito).
Good ol’ John McCain? At the time of this post, he only had one “noteworthy donor” on the Washington Post’s list: The great historical documentary filmmaker, Jerry Bruckheimer. This could only mean one thing. Bruckheimer’s next project is a look at the Iraq war and how a veteran president gives a ragtag group of retired special ops the task of bringing the terrorists to justice. Hopefully Micheal Bay is attached to direct *fingers crossed*.
(Looking at that picture at the top of the post, maybe McCain just wants there to be a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean.)
Odds and Ends…
Blog writing is hard…Stop laughing! I’m super cereal guys. I mean, you think you can sit down and write any ol’ thing and people will read it. The trick is you have to have a certain pizazz, a certain wooing tone. You also have to have content. Some people use blogs as a journal to provide interesting (and not so interesting) anecdotes on their lives. I could never do this. For one, I don’t think I’m any good at writing about my own life. Plus, who would want to read it? Here’s a rare look at some deleted scenes from this blog back when I briefly contemplated turning this thing into a running memoir.
-March 31, 2008-
Today I woke up at around 10:20 in the morning. This is the time I make the first of two decisions that will alter the course of my day. I first ask myself, “Do I really need to put pants on today?” If the answer is yes, I know I’m in for a productive day. The second question comes in later when I must decide between Popeye’s Chicken, Church’s Chicken, or the underrated Lee’s Chicken for lunch.
-April 1, 2008-
Today I was flipping through the channels and came across a plastic surgery show where they were doing breast implants. Apparently, it’s okay to see a doctor cut a person open and jab tubes in them, but Heavens to Betsy I’d better not see a nipple. Did the FCC have a meeting where somebody said, “Alright, I’ll let the outer curvature slide, but you have to blur out the entire nipple…I’m talking areola too, buddy.”? How can I sign up to be a part of this meeting? Would they make a special exception for the three-boobed chick from Total Recall? I mean, that third one has to be fake, right? Surely you don’t have to blur out fake nipples. Maybe they can just blur out those two indecent nipples on either side, but leave the fake ta-ta as is. All this thinking made me hungry so I put on pants and went to Lee’s.
You see? I don’t do much of anything interesting with my days. Who would want to read that?
Eventually I decided that this will be sort of a general entertainment/media review site. I could post links to interesting games and videos that I find online and occasionally review a movie or two. Basically my site would do what sites like Digg, Rotten Tomatoes, and Gamespot do already. The hook of my site is that I will be extremely limited in scope. I mean, with all that great content on those other sites, it would be easy to be overwhelmed with interesting articles to read. Here, you only have a few things to choose from and fewer choices make life simpler and more fun.
A lot of times I’ll sit down to write something or link to something, but I can’t think of a whole post to make about it. I don’t want to always just throw a link at you and call it a day. There needs to be a least some sort of commentary. Through this process, a lot of things end up bookmarked, but never make it to the final page. Here are some more articles or links that I want to share, but don’t want to spend a whole post on…
-Samorost-
This is a really trippy flash game I found on a indie games site. It’s basically just point and click to solve various “puzzles”. Most of the time it just kind of freaked me out, but the game has a strange logic to it that I kind of get. There’s a sequel at the same site (but ya gotta pay for that one)
-The Onion’s “Five Blades” editorial-
I had never read this before, but the site I found it on made it seem pretty much legendary and that those who hadn’t seen it should be embarrassed.
I came across this video which lead me to the Pangea Day site. It’s kind of a festival of global unity that includes short films from the world. The idea inspired me to write a post about the importance of a global view on life and how we need to treat each other with respect and not judge each other so harshly.
It was such a boring post.
It did give me the opportunity to link to my favorite internet video of all time. It’s been a staple of my Facebook page for awhile, so you may have seen it already, but I wanted to throw it out there again.
So there you have it. All my unused scraps and half-finished ideas. Everything that’s left to come will be genius, I assure you.
Movie Fight: No Country… VS There Will Be Blood
VS 
There Will Be Blood just came out on DVD today and it’s Oscar arch-rival No Country for Old Men came out a few weeks ago. I can only get one. They must fight for my love…
Round 1: Performances…
No Country for Old Men’s Javier Bardem earned his Oscar with a performance that was unsettling and ruthless and Tommy Lee Jones’ veteran sheriff routine was spot on (from what I know about veteran Texas sheriffs). But how can you go against the Oil Man here? Daniel Day-Lewis and that kid from Little Miss Sunshine truly rattled me in their scenes together.
No Country for Old Men: 0 – There Will Be Blood: 1
Round 2: Script…
High Schoolers could have performed the Coen brothers’ script and it would have been entertaining. From the “lucky coin flip” scene to just about anything Tommy Lee Jones said, it was all gold.
No Country for Old Men: 1 – There Will Be Blood: 1
Round 3: Cinematography…
No Country for Old Men had a lot of dust and beautifully shot desolate landscapes. There Will Be Blood had a lot of dust and beautifully shot desolate landscapes. Tie.
No Country for Old Men: 2 – There Will Be Blood: 2
Round 4: Soundtrack…
This one is a little unfair. There Will Be Blood had a jittery score that dominated parts of the movie, especially early on when there was no dialog. No Country for Old Men had…um…well there were those Mexican street performers about halfway through the movie. It’s hard to penalize a film for making a stylistic choice to not have music. It’s harder to not give the point to Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead guitarist and composer of There Will Be Blood’s score.
No Country for Old Men: 2 – There Will Be Blood: 3
Round 5: Sheer Entertainment Value…
If I’m going to buy a movie, I intend to watch it at least a few more times and show it to others. No Country for Old Men has shootouts, snappy dialog, chase scenes, and just as much tension as its competitor. There Will Be Blood, quite frankly, was boring through long stretches. Yeah, the milkshake freak out is awesome and the baptism scene was intense, but that’s two memorable moments in movie that’s well over two and a half hours long.
No Country for Old Men: 3 – There Will Be Blood: 3
Final Round: Memorability
Neither film has been out long enough to know how they’ll stand the ‘test of time.’ Still, it’s been a few months and I can still remember nearly every scene of No Country for Old Men. Gritty violence like that isn’t soon to be forgotten. Plus, I think the film had a lot to say on fate/chance and the amount of control we have have on our lives and our legacy. I just can’t talk about There Will Be Blood for that long before the conversation moves to that SNL parody. I think that says something.
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN WINS!!!
There, it’s settled once and for all.
“…join the dance” – The Philosophy of Alan Watts
“You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.“
I have recently discovered the writings of Alan Watts and, like anyone reading him for the first time, I have been very moved by them. He is a scholar of Zen Buddhism, but has unique way of speaking and writing that demystifies these Eastern philosophies for a Western mind such as my own. Perhaps because he was born in England and spent a good deal of his life in the U.S. I find him easier to relate to. He is less like Mr. Miyagi and more like a familiar and kooky, yet insightful, grandparent. Not to mention, there is an online video series done by “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone that animates Watts’ recordings with a playful color.
The comforting thing about his philosophy is that it frees you from having to do the one thing everybody seems to be doing: worrying. We spend countless hours trying to figure out who we are and define our existence. We try to classify, explain, and relate to God. We work our whole lives for a purpose or a reward that may or may not exist. Society, it would seem, has conditioned us to worry about so many things and then raps us on the wrist with a ruler when we question why.
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
Really, I can’t offer much new to the discussion of Watts’ ideas. I’m still just finding them for myself. There are countless books, websites and blogs that have done the job previously and better than I could ever hope to. My only purpose is to share with others who, like me, hadn’t heard of him before.
“Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.”
I urge you to check out more of his work.
More animations: “I” or the Ego
You have to burn the rope…
Every once in a while, a game comes along and changes everything. This is one of those games. I give you…
You Have To Burn The Rope
(make sure you’ve updated your flash player or the greatness may be ruined)
Madonna, Al Gore, and the Dalai Lama walk into a bar…
Every year, TIME magazine compiles a list of the most influential people in the world. They can be presidential candidates, religious leaders, religious leaders turned presidential candidates, actors, internet gurus, or milkshake drinkers.
The most interesting part of the process, for me at least, is analyzing the reader’s votes on who they think the most important people in the world are. Here are my observations on the reader votes so far (edit: This is what I get for being so gloriously ahead of the curve. All of the rankings I observed are now dated and inaccurate. Though, I’d like to think that my commentary had some effect on the final voting.)
Reason to be excited for humanity: The plummet of Dane Cook from #4 last year (#4!!?) to being off the list of finalists. If the list were extended, you’d probably find him stuck somewhere in the 800’s right between the Geico cavemen and the actors that played Nikki and Paulo on “Lost.”
Reason humanity is still doomed: Replacing Cook in the top 10 is celebrity blogger Perez Hiliton. *sigh* Internet, what hath you wrought?
Pleasant surprise: Rapper and Bona fide hustler M.I.A. Do I think she deserves to be on the list? Hellz yeah. Did I expect to see her currently sitting #23 and ahead of Jay-Z, Radiohead, and Oprah? Hellz no.
Nerd Fight!: As of this writing, Steve Jobs was barely edging out Bill Gates by two spots. Linux creator Linus Torvalds doesn’t appear to have made the list.
Who needs superdelegates?: Another interesting one-on-one competition is the one between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Currently, Obama sits in 11th with Clinton right behind at 12th, but they are effectively tied with a score of 70. Ahead of both of them at #10? Jon Stewert. Stewart/Colbert ’08!!!
Who won’t be there next year?: Ellen Page. Yeah, she’s everybody’s darling right now, but people will come to their senses and realize that Juno was more annoying than entertaining.
Top 100 Quick Facts:
Number of people that go by just one name: 3 (Bono, Madonna, and Rain)
Number of “Arrested Development” alums: 2 (Michael Cera and Amy Pohler)
People famous for launching websites: 5 (the creators of Youtube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Myspace, and Craigslist)
Go check out the list and vote for yourself. Let’s make sure that Chocolate Rain guy doesn’t win first place again…
OMG OMG OMG….It’s back!!!
You may notice a strange energy in the air today. Staff at your local EBGames or Apple store may be a little cheerier. The guy at the video store whistling “All Along the Watchtower” may be doing so with a little extra zest. That Prius passing you in the afternoon might be moving with a little more purpose. That’s because today is a day of great celebration.
BATTLESTAR’S BACK BABY!!!
I realize that despite the shows popularity and universal acclaim that many still think of it as “the show that Dwight from ‘The Office’ likes a lot.” If that’s the only experience you have with the show, I beg of you to please check it out. Go immediately acquire the first three seasons on DVD or online, but please, do yourself a favor and watch it. It is not only one of the best sci-fi shows ever, but one of the most entertaining shows I’ve ever watched, period.
Since you only have until 9 o’clock central to get caught up before the new season starts, I’ll post a little series recap video that was released. It outlines the entire first three seasons in a little over 8 minutes. Even if you’ve seen every episode already, it’s a good recap to get back in the swing of things. Plus, it’s pretty funny.
(Warning-Spoilers Ahead (duh))
And now, let me nerdgasm a little more and give you my top five Battlestar moments (again, MAJOR spoilers ahead so don’t read any further if you are going to catch up, especially #2)…
5. 33 minutes – The first episode after the opening miniseries lets you know this show isn’t frakkin’ around. Galactica must ‘jump’ to avoid the Cylons who are pursuing them, but no matter where they jump to, the Cylons manage to track them down in 33 minutes. This means the crew must stay awake and alert to make a jump every 33 minutes. The relentlessness of the Cylons and the hopelessness of the survivors situation really sets the tone for the entire series.
4. Bad Boomer – Yay! The basestar is destroyed. Starbuck got the arrow thing. The good guys win!….wait, why does she have a gun? *BANG* My mind = blown. My pants = soiled.
3. Pegasus – After 23 episodes and a miniseries of the seemingly hopeless situations and bad breaks, things finally start to look up when our heroes discover another group of survivors on the Battleship Pegasus. Too bad their commander is a crazy she-bitch. The escalation of tension between Adama and Cain is handled perfectly, culminating in a near war among the survivors.
2. “All Along the Watchtower” – Just when I started to think the show might not be perfect, it goes and does something like this. After a few lackluster episodes in season 3 (“Woman King” I’m looking at you), I was wondering how they would end it to keep me wanting more. Well, all they did was take four fan favorite characters (well…three favorites and Billy’s replacement) and reveal that they are, in fact, Cylons. And, if that wasn’t cool enough, apparently undercover Cylon agents are activated by…Bob Dylan songs?!
1. Exodus pt. 2- One of the best episodes of anything, ever. The escape from New Caprica. Col. Tigh killing his wife. Baby Hera gets found. The Pegasus pulling an Enterprise and taking some Cylons out as it explodes. Every second of this episode is exciting and makes watching every episode before it worth it just so you can watch this one. I don’t think I can over hype this one enough.
Series creator Ron Moore said recently that the show may have benefited from the writer’s strike because it forced them to rework some things leading up to this, the final season. They came back from the strike and basically rewrote a large portion of the season. We’ll find out tonight if he’s right…
