Just got home from a $5 double-feature I Love You, Man/Monsters vs. Aliens marathon with Allison, both super fun movies. Good lord, though, the awkwardness of every single character in I Love You, Man had me wishing the floor would open up and swallow me.

We went to Park 16, the old cineplex out by the freeway surrounded by warehouses and a Sonic Burger. I'm reckoning it was constructed way back when they were going through that weird phase of building malls and movie theatres with that faux-arabesque theme - arches and domes and gaudy carpets and weird palatial fixtures. El Con has a touch of it.

Anyway, I like Park 16 and its weird hexagonal theatres, and the fact that we basically had those theatres to ourselve for both films! Also, hurrah for finally seeing Monsters vs. Aliens!

"But I don't want a poster... I want a real kitten hanging from a real tree..."

Last night was the student film festival at our little cinema at work, and it wasn't bad for a 1st annual event. I firmly believe we need to institute the Gong system, however. Sure, it wouldn't exactly be supportive of 'student art' (in fact it's pretty fucking brutal), but hey, harsh criticism is the name of the game sometimes. Or maybe The Loft has just trained me to scream at moving pictures I don't like. Either way, there were a good chunk of the shorts I would have happily Gonged last night. On the other hand, there were a few that showed honest-to-goodness promising talent - always a relief when faced with a tsunami of pretentious video portfolio pieces that would be much less terrible if they didn't take themselves so fucking seriously.

The best-in-show short was extremely well done for a student piece - admirable camera work, composition, and sound design, coupled with an interesting narrative and very clever effects. It really shined as an example of a student who could grasp film theory and genre concepts and translate them into practical techniques, as well as invest the ridiculous amount of time that even half-decent movie-making demands.

Work was pretty nutty last week, but I survived. I have a million calls to make on Monday morning, because apparently the entire world was out of office on Friday (go fig).

Quite nervous because I'm going to be hitting some deadlines pretty quick here... end of May-ish is when everything comes to a head. That's a really strange idiom, "coming to a head"... I wish I knew the history of it. I feel like it might have some connection with pimples or horse racing, but beyond that I have no idea.

Anyway, got some reading to do...

feeling: okay

My beloved cat Xochitl has been staying with me on my 6-day holiday escape down at my family's ranch, but we're 4 days in and she is getting a little stir crazy.

My mother's two cats have more or less accepted her presence after a number of tense showdowns in the hallway separating the two sides of the house. Itachi is a semi-feral Pixie Bobcat with extra toes and a dominant personality, and the other one, Arthur King Of the Britons (yes) has no reference for social interaction with other felines because he was abandoned in a ditch as a newborn and knows only abuse at the hands of Itachi.

I left her for a couple of hours to drive into to town. Didn't actually purchase anything, but the possibility of a bargain was just so compelling. Anyway, I abandoned her and now she refuses to look at or speak to me.

Driving down here I copied Danielle and let her out of her carrier so she could wander around the van. In addition to screaming like a banshee she decided she had to sit on the dashboard right between me and the windshield. MISTAKE. I was also concerned that she would step on the handle and open the door on the highway, even though I have childlocks and it's difficult enough for me to get myself out of the vehicle - still, the visions of luggage and cats and papers flying out into the desert inspired me to pull into the Taco Bell drive-through and spend half an hour coaxing her back into her bright pink "Kitty Taxi" cat carrier.

She turns her nose up at the different cat food brand, sicked on the carpet, and stares me down at night.

All in all, kitty vacations = not worth it!

I'm looking at a major redesign of my LiveJournal in the near future. I never see it from the front end, and the salmon pink really scorched my retinas yesterday. All that comes to mind is my design instructor's mantra "the trick is to highlight, not to nauseate and I hang my head in shame.

We'll see what happens - Arthur King Of The Britons really enjoys sleeping on my Macbook keyboard so I rarely get a spare moment to use it.

Current Location: the ranch
feeling: awake
listening to: Colors - Kira Willey

Comment and I will....

a) Tell you why I friended you.
b) Associate you with something -- a fandom, song, color, photo, etc.
c) Tell you something I like about you.
d) Tell you a memory I have of you.
e) Ask you something I've wanted to know about you.
f) Tell you my favorite userpic from your list.
g) In return, you need to post this on your own LJ.

feeling: pensive
listening to: reno 911

I know there's been some concern about the Meet Rack having shut down since the 'Party' sign disappeared, but never fear. I was there the other night, and it's still the same as ever. Sad news about the 'Party' sign, though...

feeling: aggravated
listening to: Sparklehorse - Go

Holy shit, what is it about Arizona and helicopters colliding in midair? Deja vous, much? I think we should just ground all helicopters and flying machines during the summer months.

"The incident is not the first of its kind in Arizona."

That's just really sad, right there, in a bunch of ways.

feeling: confused
listening to: Dream Academy - Life in a Northern Town

Get the fuck outta here!! It's Paulie!



Two more episodes to go (the final two), and jlingofelt and I will have officially watched all seven (well, "six" since the last one was a weird two-parter) seasons of The Sopranos. Sad times!

feeling: sad
listening to: Cat Power - The Greatest

Pilot 'Breakdown' Diverts Flight
An Air Canada flight made an emergency landing in the Irish Republic after a pilot apparently suffered a breakdown. [...] Air Canada has confirmed that a crew member was unwell, but did not confirm he was suffering mental problems.

Or... that he was THE PILOT. This news story, as well as any other loose mental association of "crazy" and "airplane" always brings to my mind:



Scariest. Movie. Ever.

Severed Cables Disrupt Internet
Internet services have been disrupted in large parts of the Middle East and India following damage to two undersea cables in the Mediterranean.

Oh My God... Cloverfield 2!! Maybe this is an elaborate viral marketing breadcrumb!

SEA-ME-WE 4, or the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 project, as it is known, is a submarine cable system linking South East Asia to Europe via the Asian subcontinent and Middle East. Neither of the cable operators have confirmed the cause or location of the outage but some reports suggest it was caused by a ship's anchor near the port of Alexandria in Egypt.

Psh, a ship's anchor? We all know it's J.J. Abrams. Just admit it. Unrelatedly, how much fun is it to say "South East Asia Middle East West Europe 4 project" ten times fast? That's a lot of directions. I'd love to slip 'North' in there somewhere, just to fuck with people.

Dance Show Risks Sweden China Row
Diplomatic relations between Sweden and China are said to be threatened by a row over dance performances. [...] City officials from Stockholm and Linkoping say they received calls from the Chinese embassy saying the troupe was linked to Falun Gong. "They stepped way over the line. I think they really owe us an apology and an explanation," Madeleine Sjoestedt, Stockholm Vice-Mayor for Culture and Sports, told the AFP news agency.

I just wanted to post this because the headline is one of those entertaining linguistic medleys of words that have probably never been put together in the history of human language, but as I actually read the article it struck me as slightly... dramatic? I mean, it sounds to me as if this was just some kind of courtesy call - a totally paranoid courtesy call, perhaps, since this is PRC and Falun Gong we're dealing with, but I don't really think a phone call counts as "crossing the line" or a "diplomatic row". There is no report of threats or insults. Maybe the embassy staff were just total bitches or something.

Guiliani Quits White House Race
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has pulled out of the Republican race for the White House after disappointing primary results in Florida. [...] [Guiliani] said he had thought he was the sort of person who had the qualities to make a good president of the United States, "but the voters made a different choice".

Do I detect a hint of bitterness from Mr. 9/11? It must be a tad depressing to campaign for (a) year(s) just to be weeded out at this stage, like Thompson and Edwards and now Guiliani, but I still chuckled at this quote because it sounds like it was ripped from a letter written by a spurned lover. Also, I'm really digging John McCain's half-shadowed, lurking-in-the-background look in this picture, just because it really brings to my mind a scheming Senator Palpatine in Episode I: The Phantom Menace. And that look never goes out of style.

Guiliani's gushing endorsement of McCain is interesting to me, although I half-suspect that he just wants an excuse to inundate the voting public with the terms "hero", "heroism", and "9/11" on national television for the next few months. I think Edwards exited the race pretty gracefully, and I'm wondering if he's just going to slip under the political radar for a while since his wife's breast cancer resurfaced.

That was a long one, sorry.

feeling: hmmm
listening to: Kimya Dawson - Loose Lips

So, it's pretty much my bedtime (9pm, baby! I'm a bit of a party animal), but I just wanted to electronically scribble down unas cosas, lest I forget later.

Firstly, I finally got around to seeing I Am Legend, and I'm... mixed. Severely. I'm exactly 2/3 in love and exactly 1/3 in hate. I'm no John Nash, but I figure some of that love and hate can cancel itself out into apathy, which still leaves about 1/3 of love... so I suppose I can state for the record that I did, actually, enjoy the movie. END OF MATH TIME!

Quite honestly, though, I would recommend that anybody wanting to watch this movie leave the cinema after the first hour and ten minutes (or at least mentally detach the last half-hour from the rest of the film). It felt to me as if I had been on a super-fun road trip for a good long while, when suddenly the driver goes insane and drives the car off a cliff. I felt angry and betrayed!

( Further Review, cut for SPOILERS (and expletives) )

I was slightly bummed out that the Writer's Strike hit right when I actually have time to watch primetime television again, until.... AMERICAN GLADIATORS! TV at its finest. This was reality TV before reality TV even existed. I was obsessed with it when I was a kid, oddly. Well, I was into the British version of Gladiators, but it doesn't matter - different country, same general silliness.

And finally, from fourfour, I am completely bowled over by this compilation of Celine Dion weirdness! Words cannot define how much love for her I suddenly evolved based entirely on the following video:



CAN'T STOP WATCHING!

Tags: inanity
feeling: wow!
listening to: The Shins - Caring is Creepy

Fun facts from a piece of paper I dug out from a box, while cleaning:

In the 1500s, lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock people out for a couple of days. This caused people to think they were dead. They would pick them up, take them home and get them ready to bury. They would lay them out on the kitchen table for a couple of days, the family would gather around to eat, drink and wait to see if they would wake up. Thus the custom of holding a "wake".

Since England is so old and small, they started running out of places to bury people. So, they started digging up coffins, taking the bones out and reusing the graves. This is when they discovered that some of the coffins had scratch marks on the inside. One out of 25 coffins were this way and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they decided they would tie a string on their wrist and lead it through the coffin, up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night to listen for the bell. Thus the saying "graveyard shift". If the bell would ring they would know that someone was "saved by the bell" or he was a "dead ringer"

1/25? Wow...

feeling: restless
listening to: The Bird and the Bee - Polite Dance Song

I just had an anti-heart attack! As in, one that occurs due to excitement, feels really good, and doesn't kill me:



The two seasons of Dead Like Me that aired were as close to television perfection (for people like me who don't watch or particularly like television, anyway) as you can get. This is such exciting news!!!! I can't even channel it into words! I have concerns, though - are they going to be able to recapture the dark, witty spirit of four years ago? This doesn't seem like it would be particularly difficult, since it hasn't been off the air that long, but I always thought that Mandy Patinkin brought a sort of magic spark to every scene he was in. It might not be quite the same without him.

OH GOD, Delores!! Is she in it?

Just checked IMDB.com, and it does looks like Christine Willes is back on board! I put up a Delores LJ icon to celebrate! It looks as if the Daisy Adair character is being replaced with another actress, though. I always hate it when they do that. I hope they put up a more exciting trailer, too, this one is a bit iffy.

Anyway, this is a direct-to-DVD revival apparently coming out this summer, and if it is successful Sci-Fi might pick up the series again! What a dream! So if you like this show, be sure to pick up a copy or six! And if you've never seen the show, I thoroughly recommend it.

feeling: excited
listening to: The Beatles - Girl