Friday, May 21, 2004

Sorry guys. I've been quiet as Jamie's been in the hospital yet again. She's doing much, much better and I hope to get her home by Saturday afternoon.

It's a grim story on this one, but suffice it to say, the really bad part is past and what we thought might be wrong wasn't the case. Which is a GOOD thing. Her mom is here. I'm trying to get work done from home before I go to the hospital.

Adios.
I am SOOOOOOO going to buy this comic.

Thursday, May 20, 2004

I am very busy. Sorry the blogs have been short in coming.

In the meantime, enjoy any of the links off to the left below League archives.

Also, here's the new Supergirl:


Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

THANKS, SCIENCE!!!

and thank you even more, Odessa ISD.
as per a discussion we had here a few months ago... regarding why you don't want to post your picture online.
My health

My heatlh has been an issue of late as work stress increases and less and less time has been spent doing much in the way of physical activity.

At one point, in the not so distant past, I was an avid practitioner of TaeKwonDo. In these days I could spar (essentially fist fighting) for an hour at a time, getting moderately ehausted somewhere near the end. I was doing hundreds of push-ups every week (on my fingertips no less) and tons of crunches. About three years ago, that all went to hell and I just quit.

The reasons for quitting are varied, and not terribly interesting, but I basically was not ready to give up the rest of my life in order to meet the expectations of black belts within the TKD organization to which I belonged (essentially giivng up most weekends and evenings to teach, run tournaments, etc...).

As of two weeks ago, i joined a gym, and it's been revelation as to what three years of watching cartoons and B-movies will do to your physique and general health. I had a fitness assessment (of which I take some stock, but do not acept as Bible's truth for a few reasons) which suggested I had the relative phyciality of the average 38 year old. "With a few years work," the physical trainer guy told me, "You could be your own relative age." Essentially, if I totally bust ass, I stand a good chance of being 32 when I'm 32. Whoo-hoo.

Now I can only take the charts so seriously, mostly because I still recall the incident in high school health class in which I was actually off the height weight scale so far it suggested I was morbidly obese. And at this time, I was actually pretty damn skinny. I don't know if my bones are made out of concrete or what, but I've always weighed a ton for my actual physique. Getting pudgy has only made the issue amplified.

Nonetheless, I am taking the issue very seriously as I don't want to be dead. Not yet, anyway. Maybe at some point in the future, but not this year. The simple fact is that my family has a small history of heart disease, but a large one with diabetes. I need to start working on myself ASAP in order to avoid these two traps. So I am now working out as often as possible for as long as possible, and I've got a hell of alot of work to do. So bear with me as I occasionally post progress, etc...

Rationator Mirus points to an interesting story on the first "succesful" civilian space flight. Check it out.
Congratulations to Jeffrey Alan "Peabo" Peek. My pal just got hitched up on Saturday to Adriana, a girl whose standards in selecting a husband must be astonishingly low.

Jeff and I met up in 4th grade when I first moved to Austin. He was in my class and he lived down the street from me. Our buddyship was largely based around Jeff coming up with dangerous ideas and me trying to talk him down (like trying to catch rattlesnakes using my shirt for a net...).

We lived together for a year in college, went our separate roommate ways, but have always kept in touch. Jeff went off to law school in San Antonio, and has been practicing on and off in the greater Austin area (aside froma 6 month stint in Mexico). His job brought him into Adriana's realm about a year ago, and the two of them must have really hit it off as they became like peanut butter and jelly overnight.

Peabo got married on Saturday down in Old Mexico. Due to a number of limiting factors, I was unable to attend. However, Jeff's pop (PK Peek) sent along some digital photos, one of which I share below.

Congratulations, Peabo and Mrs. Peabo. Up, up and away.

Monday, May 17, 2004

I know this opinion isn't going to be popular, but can't we take a vote on euthanizing Courtney Love?

Does anybody really need Courtney Love? Isn't she really the world's most famous junkie? Has anybody ever bought a Hole record? Aren't you kind of ashamed you did? And there's that whole possibility that she maybe might have killed her husband to ensure eternal fame and fortune. And there's the very real possibility she should not be allowed within a kilometer of her own child.

Anyway, just an idea. Discuss.
Will anyone listen to The League? Probably not.

But for your viewing pleasure, PBS is airing it's own reality programming in the form of "Colonial House".

Like Manor House, Frontier House, 1900 House, 1940's House and, I think, a few before it... Colonial House is an experiment to see how a mix of modern folks do when placed into a recreation of past ways of living. Training is provided, and the participants are not asked to pretend that they're actually in the preceeding time-frame. They are asked to dress, eat, and work as if they were in the sampled time frame.

The show is run by historians and other experts, and it appears this series will take the same format as "Frontier House" and place three households into the mix.

Nobody can win. This is not a competition against each other, but rather a competition against modern expectations versus past expectations.

If the previous series are any indication, it should be well worth tuning in for. Tonight's episode is 2 hours, so it might be worth recording.
Margot Kidder rocks out...

For the official site, go here.

Sunday, May 16, 2004

This weekend the marketing media blitz began for Shrek 2 (the movie) as well as all of the Shrek cross-promotional tie-ins. From video games to soap to Sierra Mist to who know's what else, Shrek is busily hawking a multitude of products using either the real voices of the actors or some very qualified sound-alikes (this is done quite a bit. In fact, Tom Hanks' brother makes some money as Tom's sound alike for things like Toy STory video games, etc...).

I wasn't a huge fan of the original Shrek. We saw it late in the game (maybe a month after it came out), and NOTHING could have lived up to the media hype and the word of mouth hype we went through before seeing the movie. I'm not saying the movie was bad... I just wasn't as blown away as the rest of the world wanted me to be.

Well, there's nothing like whoring yourself to ensure a profit, and it's something much easier to do in the animated world than actually getting, say, DeNiro to sell potato chips. At any rate, given I'm seeing actual commercials for the movie and ads for the cross-promotion once a commercial break EVERY commercial break, I have already been overly saturated in Shrekness. Which is okay. It could have been Garfield.

Friday, May 14, 2004

I have a question regarding our situation in Iraq... and it's not politically charged... I just want to know:

Where are the Iraqis getting all of those guns?

Seriously.

In all of these pictures, the Iraqis are armed, and not just with little hunting rifles and pistols. These guys have RPG's and shoulder mounted rocket launchers and other things you can't even find in Texas. And if these guys always had these weapons, why didn't they use them before to shoot at Saddam?

What's the story?

If anyone has any answers, please fill me in.

I now know nobody reads this blog. Or at least the folks who read it can't do math any better than people who write it.

600/12 = 50. Not 5.

So caught up in proving Van Helsing was a stupid movie was I, that my math was off by a factor of 10. Yes, I have two college degrees. Shut up.

At any rate:
1 victim per month
12 months in a year
12 victims per year
5 years
60 victims in 5 years

or, as they said, 1 or 2 people
1.5 victims per month
12 months per year
18 victims per year
5 years
90 victims in 5 years

that's still a hell of a lot of people, especially if my actual estimate of the number of residents (150) is closer than the number I suggested it might be. Enough to make me begin considering listing my house with Century 21.

"Selling the house, are you, Ivan?"
"Yeah, me and Dolores put her up yesterday."
"Gettin' a wee bit scared of the vampires?"
"No... no... just part of the charm of your cold, frigid valley with no visible means of support."
"You like the castles?"
"Well, yes, but only that incredibly good looking girl in the tight trousers lives there, and nobody else ever gets to go in."
"Ah, well, we'll miss you digging for turnips with us."
"Best of luck."
"Yeah, well, plant some garlic, too, for God's sake."
"Oh, right... good idea."

At any rate, those aren't good numbers either way. Especially when you figure it's 19th century Eastern-Europe where life expectancy was probably around 40 or so.

Maybe the Transylvanians just breed like rabbits.

Thursday, May 13, 2004

I forgot the biggest dumb thing about Van Helsing.

I was going to say it's a spoiler, but it's not.

Van Helsing is more or less there to save a village of people from being plagued by Dracula. Okay, maybe not exactly (you can judge for yourself for a mere $5.50 at matinee), but if he kills Dracula, that's it, right? The people can be happy again...

Except these incredibly stupid people live in a narrow valley tucked between mountains which is prone to attacks by Vampires. Flying vampires.

So, okay... you don't want to leave your homeland even after 400+ years of vampire attacks (I think I could learn to be flexible and go somewhere with just, say, El Chubacabra). Even in Transylvania, you can still move to a more advantageous position, like, up on a hill. Or underground. Or build, say, a roof over the town. I'm not positive, but I am betting that you would start dreaming up anti-vampire defenses pretty quickly.

Keep in mind, not a clove of garlic or a crucifix is ever really seen in this town.

And the population of the town appeared to be maybe 600 people on the outside. And I think I'm being nice here, because, really, it looked liek the village had maybe 150 extras in it... tops. The villagers state that Dracula and his ladies pluck off 1 or 2 people a month, and that's acceptable. People, I know I'm no PhD in math, but those are NOT good numbers. Your village would be wiped out in 5 years with 600 people at one a month.

And who the hell wants to be the last dude standing around as the target?

Anyway, not necessarily a plot point, but it kind of was... and it made the movie all the dumber.
Yesterday, not so much after work as much as when i was done working, another guy from my office and I went to see Van Helsing. THis was not even done so much in spite of Jim D's review of the movie, but because of it. All Steans men share a common gene regarding movies. We like bad movies. It's true. And when we hear someone pronounce a movie as awful, it isn't enough to take their word for it: We have to see that stinking pile of poo for ourselves. And it didn't hurt that I had nothing better to do at work yesterday and there's a theater literally less than a block from my office I'd never been to before.

Was Van Helsing as bad as people say? Sure, I guess. Like most big budget, bloated, ridiculous summer movies, the very premise of the story made not a lick of sense. None. Not a bit. If I were in college mode and drunk and watching this movie I would have assumed the booze went to my brain and had erased crucial bits which the byzantine plot most likely tossed at me, but MGD had washed away. Not so here.

SPOILER WARNING:

Just to get it out of the way: Why the hell hadn't Dracula dedicated his endless undead life to killing all werewolves if that was the only thing can defeat him? We know he can turn them into people again, so why is he bothering with making vampire babies until he knows he's utterly undefeatable? And another thing... If the only way to go to Castle Dracula was through that stupid map, why wasn't the place a ghost-town? THey say something about wings or something... but was the castle a physical place? Where was the castle? How were the oompa-loompas flying around to get to this castle? How did the heroes get back at the end when the story made it clear the door locked up tight behind them? Why wasn't that chick's body totally rotting by the time they found the ocean? Why did the end look like a greeting card?

END SPOILERS

The sets, the costuming, etc... were all very lavishly and expensively done. In fact, the completely useless "ball room scene" was enough to make the set-designers for Cirque de Soleil green with envy.

The CG was mostly well done, and I would guess we'll never know how much stuff in the movie we'll take for granted that was actually a hard-won victory for some 3D modeller out there... but in a lot of places where it counts, the CG just wasn't very good.

And I've read a lot of bitching about the guy who played Dracula... look... I've seen Dracula with Lugosi. He's about as subtle as a Sherman tank. I think i know where this guy was coming from in his portrayal, and while it wasn't super-duper... please show me a guy who DIDN'T play a hokey version of Dracula.

One of my biggest complaints (and I'd been forewarned) was, why so much swinging? I swear there was more swinging in this than in Spider-Man. People were continually hurling around on ropes and cables to a tremendous effect which usually accomplished next to nothing.

The script was awful, and Van Helsing looked somewhat ridiculous in that hat. And the three Dracula brides were... awful. Yes, awful is the word I was looking for. But I TOTALLY dug Dracula's oompa-loompas. I'm going to make all my student workers dress like those dudes in the future.

But this was a super hero movie, hands down. Sure, it used the monsters from a few decent Universal monster movies, but it was pretty much a movie about a superhero going up against a mad scientist with a nefarious plot. And if you had any doubt, the gymnastics and wire-tricks should be enough to convince you of the true purpose.

Coppola tried to revive the Monster/ Horror movie genre (dead since the 50's, really) in the 90's. Dracula was, I hear, somewhat close to the book. Frankenstein was an odd mix of the book, movie and whatever the hell Branagh was up to. Both were fairly emotionless studies of getting through the paces of the stories and to get A list actors into monster movies. I think the end results of both movies are questionable. I've seen stage plays of both subjects that rocked the pants off of these movies.

I'm not sure the 1930's Universal monster movies of Dracula or Frankenstein were ever REALLY scary. I've read Ray Bradbury's account of seeing Frankenstein as a kid, and how he hid behind his seat. Maybe it's possible. But there's a purity of unsullied story-telling that goes along with those movies. They take a world with things that Van helsing is sorely lacking in (like, say, gravity), and add a feature into it our world that is utterly unnerving. The monsters worked (if they ever worked) because they remind us how frail and fragile we really are.

Van Helsing takes the world, removes all rules (including those of gravity and how much damage the human frame can really take), and then adds bizarre feature after bizarre feature until the canvas, as a whole, has lost any sense of meaning. How can you be afraid of the werewolf when your hero might, say, hop over the top of the werewolf while eating a hoagie at any given moment?

On an infinte number of levels, Van Helsing is a faiulre. It's not enough that it pays homage to the original source material. That's a nice effort, but... The creators seem to have utterly failed to grasp why the source material worked the first time while whoring it out to earn some sort of Monster Movie street cred (yes, Mr. Sommers... we all saw the burning windmill. Good for you.).

I'll probably watch this movie again at some point, because I'll always watch Batman and Robin over and over, even though I don't like it. It's a bit like watching an incredibly slow car crash, or maybe a train derailment over 2 hours or so.

In the meantime, I await the arrival of my movie monster box set.
So what's going on at The League?

Jamie's company is based in Oletha, Kansas (a suburb of Kansas City), and every year the folks in Kansas have a fun activity, such as going to the Kansas equivalent of Six Flags or going to a Royals game. But since Jamie's satellite office is out here in Arizona, they just don't do anything most of the time. To try and make up for this lack of fun, the Kansas office ordered the Tempe office to find something and go do it.

So Saturday we went to the Out of Africa Wildlife Park. Not much to say about it except that it was actually more interesting than the Phoenix Zoo in a lot of ways, although a much more humble affair. It's also interesting to be in a place where all that stands between you and a 600 pound tiger is a chain link fence. The key is not to piss off the tigers.

Sunday we went to see Urinetown which was being performed on campus as part of the traveling Broadway series. I thoroughly enjoyed the show, and I think other folks would like it (how can you not like a musical with songs like "Freedom, Runaway!" celebrating the need to run away when confronted by your oppressors). Not everybody liked it. We went to a matinee of the play and, as Arizona is crawling with retirees, we were surrounded by the elderly. At intermission the dudes in the men's room were vocal about their confusion. Apparently post-modernism has not yet hit the Matlock crowd, but, hey... That's okay.

The truth is, unfortunately, I will not remember the show as much for the script or the songs as much as the crowd. On Jamie's right sat a blind woman who was getting an Al Michaels play-by-play of the proceedings, and to my left sat an elderly couple who had rented headsets to better hear the show as they were both deaf. Consequently, I heard the entire show as an echo through the old people's headsets. To add to the fun, the headsets were making one of their hearing aids whistle out of control, which, apparently, neither of them seemed to notice for the entire 2.5 hour duration of the show. I don't know if you've ever heard a hearing-aid whistle from feedback or from running low on batteries, but it's absolutely horrible and intended to get the wearer to immediately remove the device.

But I'm a nice guy and so I just decided "hey, they're old. This show can't be cheap for them, either... I can live through it." But, then, of course, they started talking to each other, too. Loudly of course, because not only were they deaf, they had on those headsets and squealing hearing aids.

Finally another old guy, who had no need to have respect for old people, turned around and said "WILL YOU TWO BE QUIET?!!!!" I now love that anonymous old man in front of me and two seats down.

Before the final note of the final song, my darlings stood up and bolted for the exit, eager to beat other folks out of the parking lot and to the Early Bird Special at Denny's, I'd guess. Consequently, they missed the end of the show, more or less.

The moral of the lesson: No more matinee shows in Retirementville, USA.


Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Hi Denby!
It appears The League is 75% good and 25% evil.

thanks to Randy (who has gone 100% blogicidal) for the link.