Sigh….
Oh, F***! (installment the second)
This isn’t nearly the annoyance that a surprise brake-job is, but it’s still a bit of a pity: while looking up a bit of info for the post immediately preceding this one, I learn from Nausicaa.net that the DVD releases of three Hayao Miyazaki films, originally slated for August, have been delayed. Ugh.
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I’ll take “That Guy’s a Freak” for $500, Alex.
I’ve been watching Jeopardy! the last few days, mainly because a guy from Utah named Ken has been Champion for twenty days and won something like $600,000 as of this writing. (Here’s an already-outdated news article.) Old viewers of Jeopardy! may recall that champions could only play for five days before they were sent packing, but apparently that rule has been eliminated. This guy is pretty amazing in the breadth of his knowledge; I’ve watched five of his episodes so far and in each one but last night’s, he has gone into “Final Jeopardy!” with well over twice the total of his nearest competitor, which basically means you can’t possibly lose (unless you do what Cliff Clayvin did on Cheers when he appeared on Jeopardy!).
Anyway, in last night’s “contestant banter” segment (when Alex Trebek chats for a moment with the three contestants), Ken revealed that he keeps a “lucky token” in his pocket at all times. It was, to my immense pleasure, a Totoro. (Go here if you don’t know what a Totoro is.) I can’t root against a guy who keeps a Totoro figure in his pocket.
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It’s not his name — t’s not like he’s “Phil Spiderman”.
I don’t know when I’ll be going to see Spiderman 2, but since I referenced it the other day, my thoughts on the original film can be read here.
By the way, I think it would be cool if instead of the prosaic Spiderman 2, they would have given the film one of those over-the-top episode titles, like each issue of the comic book used to have. Something like Spiderman: Into the Web. One gimmick I recall from the comics is in the issue in which Gwen Stacey dies, the “box narration” at the beginning says something portentous like, “We can’t tell you the title of this story…yet!”, and then at the very end, it says something like, “Now you know why we couldn’t tell you the title of this story, because the title is, THE DAY GWEN STACEY DIED!”
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Heh. Heh heh. Heh heh heh! BWAA-HAHAHAHA!!!
There’s nothing like an unexpected automotive repair expenditure to put one in the mood for a bit of “schaddenfreude”. (Hopefully I spelled that right; it’s that suddenly-popular German word about taking delight in the suffering of others.) And I have to admit, this news item made me really happy, as all long-time readers will know: New England Patriots quarterback (and generally evil human being) Tom Brady has not yet received the car he “won” for being last year’s Super Bowl MVP.
(And back in February, the day after the Super Bowl, I noted how odd I found it that these athletes who earn salaries in the millions are awarded cars for being named MVP. It’s like if I, having been named “Employee of the Month” at the Store, was given a pound of boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Looks like I was right, as I am whenever I whine about the StuPats. [For newer readers, “StuPats” is my abbreviated term for “New England Stupid Patriots”. Because I hate the Patriots.])
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Oh, F***!!!!
Here’s an observation you don’t want to find yourself making:
“Gee, I never knew that my brake pedal went that far down to the floor. Amazing!”
Whoever decided, way back when, that it would be a good idea to saddle every family in America with a two-ton hunk of metal that requires constant feeding and maintenance, and that our economy should be built entirely around the assumption of everyone’s ownership of said two-ton hunk of metal, should be retroactively beaten with a very large set of sticks.
But hey, on the bright side, I’m sure that $600 would have gone to boring stuff like food and clothes for the kid and maybe a trip to a movie or something anyway. So spending it on f***ing brakes is probably a good thing, right?
F***ing car.
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Clear bay 327. We are opening the magnetic field.
Expect posting to be light this week — at least the next day or two, at any rate — while I clear some writing-related detritus from the decks.
Oh, and those so-inclined should take a gander at this quiz about Spiderman, which is actually fairly challenging. I’m really looking forward to the new movie, the original having come within fifteen minutes of becoming the best superhero movie ever. (That honor, thanks to Spiderman‘s limp ending, still belongs to Superman.)
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Buffalo’s Central Terminal, with the city skyline and Lake Erie in the distance.
Looming in the foreground of this photograph is the imposing structure of Buffalo’s Central Terminal, once the arriving point for all of Buffalo’s passenger rail travel. The trains stopped coming there over two decades ago, however, and the facility has since fallen into disrepair and neglect. In recent years, volunteer efforts have focused on cleaning and restoring the Terminal, although no one is sure just what use the building would serve. From the image, one can see that the “Central” moniker is a bit of a misnomer, as downtown lies several miles distant. The Terminal actually lies in Buffalo’s East Side, which is the city’s most impoverished and crime-ridden section. Still, it is a beautiful building that, like so many in this city, deserves a better fate than what it has received.
I was reminded of the Central Terminal by Mandelei, who linked it just the other day. The photo above links to the Central Terminal’s current website, which contains a pretty impressive gallery of “Then and Now” pics.
(A story I’ve been working on, incidentally, uses the Terminal as inspiration for one of its locations within my fictional Great Lakes city of New Mowbray, Michigan. Basically I’ve created a city wherein I can transport a lot of Buffalo-type stuff without having to actually be accurate about Buffalo. Trivia break: The fictional city of Port Charles, NY, the setting for the soap opera General Hospital, is sometimes said to have been modeled on either Buffalo or Rochester.)
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Something to watch
A trailer for the upcoming film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera is available here.
I have to confess that I reacted very strongly against this show for years, because for about five years you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing that big, pounding organ theme or the song that every high school baritone in the country had to add to his repertoire, “The Music of the Night”. But I finally did actually see the bloody thing in 1999, when a touring production finally came to Buffalo, and I was surprised at how effective the thing was. I hope the film is good, and if successful, that we get a film version of Les Miserables, the show I’ve managed to not see even though the thing plays in Buffalo almost annually.
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Your Burst of Weirdness (on the right day, for once)
A few days ago, Jostein kvetched a bit about the fact that apparently folks in Norway aren’t as lucky as the folks in Capistrano: instead of swallows, they have to contend with slugs.
Well, in America we have a saying that’s constantly on the lips of people who are so optimistic you often want to drop one of Monty Python’s 16-ton weights upon them: “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!”
(You can probably see where I’m going with this.)
“When life hands you slugs, make slug fritters!”
(Upon perusing the recipe, I have to say that it seems a bit wimpy to me. You mince the slugs before mixing them into a batter? What’s with that? It seems to me you should just batter them whole and deep-fry them, if you’re really going to do this. Yeesh.)