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When I was a kid, I wanted to marry Princess Leia. Of course, I didn't know her very well, but I sensed that our lifestyles would be compatible, interested as we both were in the struggle for galactic justice.
I'm about halfway through Carrie Fisher's latest book The Best Awful, right at the part where Suzanne Vale cracks foxy about the mammary-inspired shape of the nuke plant between LA and San Diego as she heads for the Tijuana border with a head full of opiates and I'm just thinking, do our heroes always have to follow us through life?
I mean, I wanted to be Ozzy Osbourne when I was 12, running around on stage, biting the heads off of rodents and screaming about alienation. Now I *am* Ozzy Osbourne, stumbling around the house, tripping over cats and mumbling to myself about the fecking remote control.
The company I work for is moving from our studio space in Walnut Creek to the corporate mothership in Redwood Shores this week.
But not me. Not my team. We're going to haunt this cubicle tomb for another few months and then we're moving to our own special place in Emeryville, just for us. Because we're pirates! Because we're The Chosen! Because our boss doesn't want to commute!
This is not a good or a bad thing. It just sort of is. On the one hand, I'll be back in first-to-second wave mode, at least day-to-day. I think this is good. I'll admit that I've gotten used to my nice, warm corporate blanky. It came in handy with all the lifestyle management we've had to do over the last few years to have a stable work life. I don't need Steve Jobs screaming at me to be brilliant at 4:00 am.
Actually, I don't need that, ever. I don't work for The Steve. I work for Will Wright. He doesn't scream and he's smarter than The Steve and has cooler toys, so nyah!
So, anyway...
The new digs means I need to get back into Xerox PARC mode. Less anonymous. More wunderkind. Which is fine. I've actually started programming again for fun a few months back.
But we're not there yet. We're in the interzone. Everyone is buzzing about and making moving plans and we're just...here. And they took the soda machine. I managed to get the last Diet Coke out before they hauled it away.
We will walk these gray carpeted halls like thirsty ghosts for two more months, without relief, without...Diet Coke.
So, Rhea County Tennessee of Scopes Monkey Trial fame wants to make homosexuality a crime and prevent homosexuals from living there.
I'm all for it. More power to them. Just so long as they also make illegal for anyone from Rhea County to ever fucking come HERE.
Bring it on. Bring on the hate. Let's let everyone see it. Let's let everyone see where the line is. Now.
Moment of silence for the man who had nothing better to do, so he got a bunch of retards and drove them to the zoo.
Saw Elvis Costello at the Warfield last night. He was more singer/songwriter and less rocker/roller, and the set was essentially all encores, but it was still a good show.
But he did throw my rhythm off a little bit. After sixteen years of (at least periodically) seeing live performances, I've come to expect a certain protocol to encores. The first encore is three or four songs, maybe a couple of new songs. The second encore is one or two songs, usually one of your better known works (yeah, I got your birdhouse right here, right here in my soul.) Usually you leave it at that. If you have a third encore, it has to be your cover of 'Wild Thing.' You know you have one, just do it.
Speaking of which, X is coming to town, complete with Exene, John Doe and everything. Never did get to see them live.
Anyway, I respect Elvis and he earned the right to his own stage presence a LONG time ago. Nevermind the music, just his role in "Straight To Hell" earns him a lifetime Get Out Of Being Bitched Out By Your Fans card.
I know, you think "Straight To Hell" sucked. You're wrong.
Still, when you're getting into your fourth or fifth encore and you're whipping out the ukulele, all I'm sayin' is that my circadian rhythms are delicate things. That's all I'm sayin.
On the heels of the overwhelming box-office success of "The Passion of The Christ," Mel Gibson has announced a new biblical project: "The Plagues of The Moses."
Based on the book of Exodus, this film will depict in detail the ten plagues brought on the people of Egypt.
Notably excluded from the film is any material relating to the life of Moses, the enslavement and liberation of the Hebrew people, the ten commandments or the journey to the promised land.
"It's just the plagues," Gibson told CNN celebrity interviewbot Larry King. "If the Jews have a problem with that, let them make their own movie. They already control Hollywood anyway. But I mean that in a good way. They do a real good job controlling Hollywood."
The film, which has not yet begun production, is already drawing criticism for its violence and its depiction of Jewish characters.
"Mr. Gibson proposes to show Egyptian babies being eaten alive by locusts and pregnant women pummeled to death by baseball-sized hail while Hebrew children point and laugh," complained Rabbi Sidney Martin Sidmartinson of the watchdog group "What Is This, The Media?"
"I also understand that the Pharaoh is depicted as a kind and reasonable man who is more than willing to let the Israelites go, and that Moses decides to take it on himself to unleash the plauges anyway while he dances and eats potato pancakes. I'm sorry, but that's just not in the bible."
"Oh, yeah?" responded Mr. Gibson, producing a copy of his screenplay and jamming it into the antique Talmud Rabbi Sidmartinson was carrying under his arm. "Well, it is now, tough guy. What are you gonna do about it? You gonna cry?"
While final casting has not been determined, fellow Australian hearthrob and drunken bully Russell Crowe has been offered the coveted role of Moses.
"When he fust approached me with this offa, I read the script and ah'll be onest, ah thought the paht where Moses beats a homeless man to death with his staff was ovah the top," Crowe told a fire hydrant he mistook for Diane Sawyer. "But then Mel reminded me that killin' wasn't technically a sin yet at that toym, so I punched 'im in 'is walleroo and told 'im ah'd do it!"
One of the technical challenges of the production is Gibson's desire to have all the actors speak in authentic ancient Egyptian dialects. Unfortunately for Gibson, no oral tradition survives from that era, so no one knows for sure what ancient Egyptian sounded like.
"No wurries," Crowe muttered into a bus stop toilet. "We'll just speak pig-latin. No one will notice."
Production is set to begin this summer in Egypt. Despite the controversy, Gibson says he and his crew have received a warm welcome from Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Reached for comment, Mr. Mubarak told this reporter: "Sure I'm letting Mel film here. Finally, someone has the guts to tell the truth about that whole Moses incident. And if Ariel Sharon doesn't like it, he can kiss my sandy ass."
So, we want to let 14-year olds vote.
Sounds silly at first, but then again, most 14-year olds are at least attending daily civics classes. They probably know more about the gubmint than their retarded parents.
And this capped it for me:
Said Assemblyman Ray Haynes: "There's a reason why 14-year-olds and 16-year-olds don't vote. They are not adults. They are not mature enough. They are easily deceived by political charlatans."
Our governor is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ah-nold SCHWARZENEGGER, people. This is who the "mature adults" picked.
So I say, give 14-year olds the vote. I, for one, look forward to the refreshing, outsider perspective governor-elect Squarepants will bring to this state.
Okay, so, I'm one of those people who doesn't want to know ANYTHING about a movie before I see it, so I have assiduously avoided any press or reviews on this one. I *hate* it when reviewers give away the ending.
So, I went into this movie not knowing what to expect and let me just say, it TOTALLY ROCKS.
Okay, it starts out a little slow. There are these guys in this garden at night and some of them fall asleep and one of them is all "hey, wake up" and they're all "sorry." And everybody's speaking, like, French or Swedish or something. So, I'm all, like, BOOORRRING.
And then these weird guys in leather pants and funny hats show up and these two guys kiss and I'm thinking "oh, great, another French garden fag movie. I could have stayed home and watched Bravo if I wanted to see this."
But BOY am I glad I didn't, cuz what happens next is, the guys in the leather pants move in and they bag this one dude and just start WAILING on him. I've never seen anything like it. They tie him up in chains and start punchin' him and kickin' him and then they throw him off this bridge and then Gollum runs away, which was weird, and then they take him to these, like, priest dudes and the priest dudes are all "waste him" and the leather pants guys are all "aw, can't we just beat him up?" and the priest dudes are all "waste him."
So, then, get this, they take him to this, like, whipping post thing and they've got these canes and these flogs with fishhooks on them and bunch of other stuff out of the Stormy Leather fall catalog and then they open up an ECONOMY sized can of whup ass on this guy. I shit you not. I mean, you could viddy well the red, red kroovy and slooshy the panting and moans of the tolchoking malchicks real horrorshow, my little droogies.
So then the leather pants guys put a shrubbery on his head and haul him up in front of the priest dudes and the leader of the leather pants guys is all, like, "I think he's had enough" and the priest dudes are all, like, "NOT!"
So, then, they give him like this heavy cross thing to carry. At this point, I gotta tell ya, I had no idea WHERE they were going with this one, but I was TOTALLY along for the ride. This guy was fucked UP. You could see, like, his ribs poking out and his teeth all broken. I even think his hair was bleeding.
So, you'll never guess what happens next. They take him up to this mountain and they fucking NAIL him to that cross. And, like, they couldn't get his one arm all the way over to the nail hole, so they had to, like, dislocate his shoulder and it made this total gnarly crunching sound. This one girl in my row nearly hurled on that one. It was AWESOME.
So, then, they have him all nailed up and guess what? The flip the cross OVER a couple of times so he's face down in the dirt and then he's on his back again and I'm all, like, MAN, that's GOTTA HURT!
Then they haul him up and there are these other two dudes up there with him and this one guy laughs and so a crow pecks out his eyes and then they think the main dude might be dead, so they stab him in the side and all the blood comes gushing out all over one of the leather pants guy's face and down his hot, chilsed chest toward his musky, manly nether regions as he starts rubbing the warm, sticky blood all over his...
...uh...
Anyway, I don't want to ruin the ending for you, but afterwards they show him waking up in this, like, cave and I'm all GIVE ME A BREAK! What, is it supposed to have just been a dream? What a cop out. I hate movies that do that.
But then, here's the twist, they show his HANDS, right? And you can see that they've got holes in them. So that's like a signal that maybe this stuff all really happened. It was like a double-twist Twilight Zone ending.
But still, it's kind of lame. I mean, if they wanted to leave the story open for a sequel, they shouldn't have killed off the main character in the first place. Worse yet, they don't even bother to TRY to explain it. He's just alive. I'm all, like, WTF?
And besides, it's a TOTAL ripoff. I mean, where have we seen this "he died and then came back to life" thing before? Maybe in a little movie called "The Matrix?!?" Ever heard of it, Mel?
Still and all, even though the ending was a total lame ripoff, it was a great movie. I really learned a lot. Like, people are always saying, "who killed Jesus?" Was it the Jews? The Romans? All mankind? I think the movie makes a pretty compelling case that it was those guys in the leather pants.
Wow. This is just so. Wow. Uh, I'd like to thank my mom and dad, some guy named Marty, the entire country of New Zealand...
Oh, we have the number one hit on Google for "You've never given up on anything in your life! Now fight!"
Not only is it a wonderful message to everyone out there struggling for the right to marry, but we also beat out all the MST3K home pages! Hah! In your FACE, bitches!
I own an 1997 Saturn SC-1 coupe. Despite a somewhat WIDE turning circle and a ravenous appetite for alternators (about one a year), I like this car. I gets halfway decent mileage, it's low to the ground, it handles well.
But, I have been annoyed by the citrusy bouquet of its electrical system. Altenators really should last for, like, five years. So, when my car died on Friday, I'm thinking, time for lemonade again?
But no. Not this time. This time it was mice.
...beat...
You read me right, pal. Mice. Fucking MICE have taken up residence in my engine block and taken to chewing away at the electrical wires.
Other than that, it's a hell of a day. I can't believe I voted for Dennis Kucinich. I think I just wanted to give "Return of the King" a real clean sweep by voting for a hobbit. Besides, Frankenkerry's got this thing. If he didn't, I'd swing with him. One for the team, did my time, fuck off Ralph, I'm VOTIN' DEMOCRAT!