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I have a new favorite movie theater in the Seattle area. Cinerama is about to get their asses handed to them.
I went to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy at the Loews at Alderwood today. Wow. The place has ample free parking, including a covered garage, and the place is MASSIVE. I estimated the posters on the outside of the building at thirty feet high. The entrance to the building is on the second story, and the atrium when you walk in rivals any arena I’ve ever been to. Just spectacular.
All manner of gastronomic delights were available (including pizza, and dedicated ice cream and coffee stands), and the condiment stands let you apply your own Real Butter Flavored Imitation Motor Oil (and I’m prolly gonna get my Gourmand Card revoked for this, but when I’m at a movie, load that oil on early and often.), and the theater was easily as big as Cineramas, with the raiseable armrests and rocking chairs and stadium seating and all kinds of legroom. Just awesome. THIS is the way to watch a movie. (And did I mention, free parking?)
And the movie? I really liked it. The standard argument from the people who have panned it is “it’s not like the book”. Yes. It’s not. And you know what? I am perfectly fine with that. I’ve already read the book. I have no problem seeing the story told a different way, and with lots of eye candy. There were lots of book references and in-jokes, and they made me happy, and I thought the story was perfectly fine.
And let’s hope they get the folks at Shynola to do the menus and lots of lots of supplementary information for the DVD. Would you buy the DVD if it had a second disc that was basically a functioning Guide? Damn, I would.
The Four Of You know what Starlight Mints are, right? Those little red and white candies that you get with your check at the end of a meal?
Well, after the post office (see below), I drove through Taco Hell ‘cuz I realized I hadn’t had any lunch. And I was delighted to upend the bag when I got home and watch a Starlight Mint tumble out along with my burrito. Back when I was little, when Mom went to drop off Dad’s shirts (My dad has a thing for wool shirts) at the dry cleaner, I used to go in with her and was permitted to select a piece of candy from the dish by the counter, which more often than not contained Starlight Mints. There is hard candy I like more, but I smile whenever I see a Starlight Mint.
So I polish of my burrito, and squeeze the mint from its wrapper, still mildly amused that Taco Hell now takes at least a cursory concern about my breath. I popped the mint in my mouth, and got ONE HELL of a shock:
Starlight Mints are supposed to be PEPPERMINT. Not cinnamon. PEPPERMINT.
My new Palm took a dump on me last night. Turns on to a white screen. For a while the screen was coming back if I did a hard reset, but now it isn’t even doing that. Plus, it’s turning on intermittently. It is, for all intents and purposes, an ex-Palm.
So, this morning, a couple of phone calls with PalmOne, and I’m off to the post office to schlep the thing off to them so they can (they claim “fix”, but I’m thinking more “replace”) it.
And when I’m sending a $250 piece of electronics through the mail, you bet your ass I’m covering myself, so I bought the insurance, which ended up almost doubling my shipping costs.
And while I’m driving home, I think to myself: what the HELL do I have to buy insurance for? Aren’t I ALREADY paying the USPS to take my package and send it to the location I dictate? Doesn’t it seem reasonable to assume that part of this service would include a) the guarantee that the service so contracted is actually carried out accurately, and b) that the parcel arrives in the same condition that it’s sent in?
If I ran, say, a dry cleaner, and one of my machines chewed up a load of laundry, and I didn’t accept responsibility for the problem when the people came back and received a basket of shredded clothes, I would be out of business before you could say Movin’ On Up.
It’s not their official motto, but it’s on a plaque in front of the main post office in New York, so they should be beholden to it anyhow: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
Apparently keeping the package in good shape isn’t a job requirement.
Hey, sorry I haven’t written anything in a while. Let’s just say it’s been an…interesting month. As in the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”
Fortunately, every so often items come along that are too good to pass up. The Four Of You know (often because you’re the ones playing them with me) that I’m a big fan of board games. And a lot of the games I play are European in origin, which means that on occasion the language used in the game’s directions, cards, and such is not English. Sometimes the language barrier requires a little more effort to play a game, and sometimes, the game is abstract enough that it doesn’t make a difference. The latter is the case with Reiner Knizia’s Einfach Genial, which was published in Europe last year. The English translation is “Simply Ingenious”, but the name given to it in the English-speaking parts of Europe is “Mensa Connections”. It is an excellent game, and was one of the five finalists for the 2004 Spiel des Jahres, one of the higher honors that can be bestowed upon a board game.
The Four Of You have probably heard of Mensa, the society open to people who can score in the top 2% in a standardized intelligence test. I have some opinions about this group, and to a wider extent about intelligence tests as a whole, but they aren’t really germane to this piece, so we’ll save them for another time. (Suffice it to say I’m not a member. By choice.)
At any rate, each year a bunch of them get together and play a boatload of games and decide which of them are fit to carry their “Mensa Select” seal, which means they think that those chosen are good games for smart people to play or something. (Where I come from, Select is the rating given to beef that isn’t good enough to be Choice or Prime.)
(I further feel compelled to point out that if you were to take the top 10 games for a given time period as voted on by the Mensa folks, and the top 10 games for that same period voted on by the knowledgable gaming community at large, the lists would differ significantly. Infer what you will from that.)
Anyhow, I direct you to a letter to the editor of the Seattle Weekly, for the week of December 8-14, 2004:
An interesting concept [Gift Guide 2: Mind, Body, Spirit, “Play, Einstein!” Dec. 1]. Unfortunately, Roger Downey missed a major opportunity. Had he gone to the site of American Mensa (www.us.mensa.org) instead of British Mensa, he would have found information about Mind Games and some 75 games Mensans have tested and designated as Mensa Select over the past 16 years. The list includes such games as Apples to Apples, Scategories, the Poll Game (made in Seattle), and many, many more.
The board game he mentions, “Mensa Connections,” cannot be sold in the United States under our licensing agreement. We tested it last year at our games competition and found it wanting. We did not want the Mensa name on the game in this country.
Jim Blackmore
National Marketing Director,
American Mensa, Ltd.
Thank God for the people of Mensa, for preventing me the unspeakable horror of playing substandard mind-rotting games! Oh, and Jim, if you happened across this in a vanity search, get off your damn high horse: The game can absolutely be sold in the States, and in fact has been available in German form for a year. Ya ever hear of this new concept called “importing”? (The fact that you misspelled “Scattergories” is another joke unto itself, but, again, I digress.)
So here’s the punchline: Apparently this year’s Mensa MindGames event came to a close today, and the list of the recipients of the oh-so-coveted Mensa Select rating made its way onto one of the gaming newsgroups I read.
One of the lucky winners? A new release entitled “Ingenious”. Which just happens to be the domestic version….of Einfach Genial.
Yeah, I’m a Durannie.
Much like “Trekkie”, “Durannie” is the somewhat derisive term assigned to the fans of the quintessential 80’s band Duran Duran. Unlike “Trekkie”, however, we don’t get a bug up our collective asses and insist on being called something even dippier like “Duranners” in a desperate effort to save our remaining self-esteem.
Anyhow, I’ve been a fan for a LONG time. Technically, “Rio” is the second album I’ve ever owned, but it was the first one I actually cared about enough to take proper care of it. (The first was Queen’s “The Game”, which I was foolish enough to leave within grasp of the exploring hands of my well-he-would-have-been-about-three-year-old younger brother. Little kids LOVE pulling the tape out of cassettes. You see where that went. To his credit, he replaced it for me as a birthday gift over a decade later.)
Best? Song? Ever? “The Reflex.” I literally hunted down the 45RPM single for that song for YEARS, because, as all Durannies know, the version on “Seven And The Ragged Tiger” sucks rocks. (The 45 is the version you hear on the radio and MTV. When MTV plays videos. Which isn’t often anymore.) I finally found it in a Musicland in Salinas, California, my first exposure to the glory that is the Sam Goody chain. Had I known at the time how much money I would hand over to that company in the fifteen-plus years to follow (they own Best Buy, you know), I’d have framed the receipt.
Anyhow, one of my more disappointing purchases was their “Arena” album. Mind you, I was still such a fan that it furthered my quest in owning anything Duran, but the main reason I had it was for “The Wild Boys”, the studio single. The live stuff was…well, kinda poor.
I remember Live Aid, July 13, 1985. I watched ALL DAY for Duran Duran’s set in Philadelphia. And finally, around 5:30P Pacific time, they came out….and they weren’t that good. By all evidence, I was forced to conclude that Duran Duran was a crappy live band.
And as a result, despite several opportunities, I have avoided seeing them in concert. (To wit, over the same time period, I’ve seen Def Leppard four times.) Until a week and a half ago.
See, after the Live Aid show, the band effectively broke up and started pursuing other projects – Andy and John Taylor did the Power Station thing, and Nick, Simon, and Roger did their Arcadia project. Then Roger left, and John reformed Duran Duran with Nick and Simon, but it was never the same from that point.
But in 2001, rumblings of a reunion started cropping up..and were confirmed. Then they started playing shows again, and then they went back into the studio and recorded their current album, “Astronaut”, which they released in 2004. The REAL Fab Five (FUCK those Queer Eye guys. In a figurative way, of course) was together again.
And, in touring to support that album, they came through Everett a week and a half ago. And in celebration of their reforming, I lifted my self-imposed boycott on live Duran concerts and paid a truly disgusting amount of money to take myself and a friend (and fellow fan) visiting from out of town.
Worth. Every. Penny.
The Arena album should be taken off of the market, and their performance stricken from the Live Aid DVD set, as unrepresentative of their work. It is my hope that anyone else who has formed the misguided opinion that Duran Duran is a poor live band read this post and decide to give ’em a shot when they come through your town, because I promise you they will not disappoint. They were simply AMAZING, especially Andy’s guitars and Roger’s drums, which I found particularly interesting because Duran Duran has always been known for their synthesizer sounds, and Roger in particular always seemed to be along for the ride.
And while they were there to support “Astronaut” (they played no less than five tracks from the new album, which made me get my copy out in the last few days to give it a second listen, and I’m glad I did), they know where their bread is buttered, and they played most of the oldies, too.
Not including, alas, “The Reflex”. Which is OK, I hear that sucks live….
So there was much buzz over the start of this seventh installment of The Amazing Race, particularly with the inclusion of the champion and runner-up from Survivor All-Stars, Amber Brkich and Rob Mariano. Their (well, okay, Rob’s) scheming was generally resented on Survivor, and were they just trying to extend their fifteen minutes by running in the Race?
I never thought I would say this, but there is no team in this field I want to win the million dollars MORE than Rob and Amber.
While Rob’s scheming nature might have been distasteful on a social game like Survivor, it’s PERFECT for the Race. Amber is very much along for the ride (as she was on Survivor; her victory was more a matter of the jury not wanting to give the money to Rob than wanting to give it to her), but she’s pleasant eye candy, so we’re fine with that. Rob is the only guy out there PLAYING the game – bribing bus drivers, taking advantage of his (waning) celebrity to get help from the locals, even talking contestants into abadoning challenges in favor of a four-hour penalty – it’s obvious he CARES about winning and will go to whatever length to do that. And the other teams are standing there slackjawed, and bitching and whining instead of giving as good as they’re gotten. Bravissimo.
So you know, in the wake of dropping my keys down the elevator shaft, I never got around to making that post about the fine evening leading up to the incident.
A buddy of mine’s wife plays ice hockey on a team associated with the Seattle Women’s Hockey Club, and that night they were holding their Exhibition Games and Beer Garden Fundraiser. About a week before, they were contemplating how they could scare up an announcer for the event. Hello, over here. Eventually they got the bright idea to call me, I considered it for exactly 2.4 seconds, and accepted the gig.
Reason #62854 why hockey is the greatest game in the world: the public address announcer is actually mentioned in the NHL rulebook. He is required by rule. Of course, this rule is frequently broken on ponds and in small rinks across the country, but it was good to see the SWHC adhering to code. ;)
So the club President, who I also happen to know via having met her at the annual Tri-Birthday Celebration thrown in May for myself and two friends of mine with birthdays within a week of my own, gets in touch with me a week in advance, and actually has scripts for me. This was a level of preparation I was not used to, and was thrilled to see, as I was able to spend the week rewriting the information in my own voice while still getting across the information they wanted to disburse. Usually, this is something I’m furiously doing on game night via scribbles in the margins of the notes they give me, instead of editing it in nice big text on my laptop, which enabled it to double as a TelePrompTer. (Yeah, I have no idea why they capitalize the second T, but it’s a brand name, and I’d hate to see it go the way of Jell-O.)
Said laptop also tripled as the music system, as I loaded my entire MP3 collection to it, ripped a bunch of other songs I had on CD that I thought would fit well, and downloaded a few more. (Shhh. Don’t tell the MPAA. Or RIAA. Or AARP. Or AADA. Generally keep it quiet from anyone with a lot of ‘A’s in their name.) So, a trip to Radio Shack to get a couple little adapters I needed on Saturday, and it’s off to the game.
As expected, last-minute preparations were at a fever-pitch as I was trying to set up, which always makes me a little antsy, but with some help I got everything hooked into the sound system at the rink and my sound checks done. And when I went on the mic the first time, I have to admit I had a little bit of stage fright, as I was playing to a full rink, and wasn’t expecting to.
But it didn’t take long for me to get into the swing of things, and I don’t want to sound like I’m tooting my own horn here (even though I suppose I am), but it’s a crying shame there isn’t a full-time industry for public-address announcing, because DAMN am I good at it. Much as Gretzky’s office was directly behind the net, mine is behind that mic in the scoring box. And it’s fun and satisfying to do something you do well.
But the greatest part was meeting everyone. What a GREAT bunch of women, they couldn’t have been nicer, and they truly appreciated having someone there to make their games feel like a major event. And the feeling was mutual…I truly appreciated that they WANTED me there, and it totally pumped me up to hear how much they enjoyed it. You just don’t get genuine props like that a whole lot.
I’ve been told I’m welcome back anytime, and I may well take them up on that next chance I get!
This morning, while I was getting dressed for work, I flip on the TV, and there’s The Today Show on NBC, and Matt Lauer is introducing Jose Canseco, live and in person at the NBC News studios at 49th Street and Rockefeller Plaza.
For the non-sports fans, Jose was a baseball player who enjoyed some success in the late 80’s and early 90’s, most notably in 1988 for becoming the first player in baseball history to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in the same season, before losing in the World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers in five games. (As a former Dodger fan, I had to get that shot in. :)) Unfortuntately, those ubiquitous “personal demons” caught up with him, and the twilight days of his career were spent in relative obscurity, if not notoriety.
And now he’s written a book, which I refuse to plug by name (if you really wanna know, search Amazon, I’m sure it’ll pop right up), a tell-all where he not only admits to having taken steroids during the majority of his playing career (and if you’ve seen him, you can file that one directly under “N” for No Shit), but he also outs several other players, including Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi, and Bret Boone, as being regular steroid users themselves. And, of course, the media being what it is, this is causing some controversy, and Jose’s doing the talk show circuit to drum up some more sales.
No shock here. This is the same Canseco who ran a 900-number in his heyday where you could find out what he had for breakfast, who has sold off a great many of the momentos of his playing career, including MVP trophies, equipment, milestone baseballs, and stuff of that nature. Jose’s always been about the Benjamins.
Now, the great thing about writing a tell-all book is that you can pretty much make any accusations you want and the people being accused don’t get a floor to respond. So, of course, Lauer lays in with the questions. “How do you respond to their denials?” “Is it all about the money?” “Why are you selling your World Series ring?” (He was a member of the 2000 Yankees, I believe by trade. One at-bat in the Series itself. He struck out.)
(Oh, now, THIS is interesting. I was gonna link to the ring on Jose’s online store, but it’s no longer there, and at $40,000, I doubt it found a buyer. But you can get a game-worn autographed jersey from when he was with the White Sox (I don’t even remember him BEING with the White Sox) for the low low price of $745.95.)
Of course, Jose neatly dodges everything thrown at him, and, with some blather along the lines of “Something’s gonna happen in a month. I can’t talk about it, but you’re gonna wanna keep watching. ‘Cuz something’s gonna happen. That I can’t talk about. In a month. The something, that is.”, strongly hints that he’s gonna take a lie detector test to prove the veractiy of his claims…on Pay Per-View.
You see it coming, of course. In cooperation with our friends at Oreck Vaccuums, we proudly offer a “You Just Suck”…to Matt Lauer. For letting Jose get away with it.
If Matt really wanted to, he could have put the screws to Jose, but he didn’t. Every time Jose started dodging a question, Matt just took it, and moved along to the next question. Yeah, sometimes he pressed for an answer, but he never once called him out outright for not giving one. Big fat softballs, right across the plate. Might as well have been Larry King.
(And a second one should go to whoever booked Jose’s dumb ass on the show to start with. Because if you had done ANY research at all on the guy, you should have been able to tell that this was EXACTLY where the interview was gonna go.)
I’m about to go to sleep, but I had to write this one as the events were all fresh in my mind.
It was about ninety minutes ago that I got home from a particularly wonderful night out, helping some friends out with a hockey exhibition. Indeed, it was such a fine night that it will probably get its own entry sometime later today. But right now, I’m not here to talk about that.
I think we’ve all experienced a Slow Motion Moment at one time or another in our lives. The nutshell of a Slow Motion Moment is this: something dreadful is about to happen, and the Moment begins. For the duration of the Moment, life is now moving in Matrix-esque bullet-time, Indeed, the Slow Motion part of the Moment starts about a quarter- to a half-second before the actual incident that triggered the Moment takes place. This is so you can get a good solid look at the incident from start to finish, and even get that false sense that you could have done something to prevent it. Not that you could have…once a Moment is underway, there is no force of nature that will keep it from playing out to a conclusion. In fact, I believe that interrupting a Slow Motion Moment would rip a huge hole in the space-time continuum and swallow up the very Universe as we know it in a fantastic explosion of supernovaing stars and Cheesy Poofs.
So I arrived home, tired and content after a long night of good work and a double cheeseburger and fries from Denny’s, and I walk into the elevator lobby in the bottom floor of my building, punch the button, and watch the door open immediately, as it does so often when I get home at a late hour. And I’m not thinking twice about it, and I step into the elevator, sifting through my keyring to locate the one which will release the lock on my front door.
And the Moment begins.
Slowly, oh so slowly, the keys slip through my fingers. I have a lot of keys and fobs and such on my keyring, to the point that friends of mine have commented on it. I also have four fingers and an opposable thumb on my left hand, so you would THINK that one of the latter would be able to intertwine somehow with one of the former and keep the keys safely within my grip. But, this being a Slow Motion Moment, this was not to be.
Nope. The keys tumbled gently from my hands. And a detailed analysis of the trajectory of the keys as they left my hand, combined with the force of gravity, made my blood run cold. For I knew precisely where the keys were going to hit when they reached the ground, and it wasn’t good news at all.
You see, my faithful readers, there is a gap of about an inch and a half between the elevator door and the car itself. And it just so happened that I dropped my keys at the exact time necessary for them to fall neatly through that gap, coming to rest with an unceremonious clatter some eight feet further down at the bottom of the elevator shaft.
A friend of mine brought up a very good point about this: Nothing good has ever come from keys. The only things that can happen to you when you have keys are bad things: they break, or fail in some other kind of mechanical fashion. Or they get trapped behind one of the locks they are designed to open, such as we do when we lock them in the car. Or they get lost outright. Or, in this most bizarre of cases, they are quite simply out of reach at the exact time you need them most.
So at 2:00a on a Saturday night, I experienced the unique pleasure of waiting out in the cold for 40 minutes while the maintenance guy (who, while understandably displeased at being awoken, was surprisingly tolerant of my ultimate act of dipshittedness otherwise…I guess that good karma of saying “Good morning!” on my way out to the car every day to go to work was paying off) drove out to me, and recovered my keys in a three-minute operation – he ran the elevator up to the top, stopped it, forced the door open (there’s a hole you can shove I-think-it-was-a-screwdriver into that detaches the outer door so you can open it manually), and climbed down a conveniently-placed access ladder to arrive at key-level. It will probably cost me a fortune. And I will pay it gladly.
I’m a big fan of biometrics right now.
So let me get this straight: The same Donald Trump who shitcanned a contestant last week without the benefit of a second Boardroom session and allowed a player to forfeit an Exemption outright on a complete and total whim last season now refuses to fire a player at the behest of his ENTIRE TEAM who completely and utterly sandbagged their efforts because he was Exempt himself and could get away with it? All of a sudden, “rules are rules”? When the hell did THIS start?
Is that a single fin I see behind the landing ramp? The theme from “Jaws” I’m hearing? Evgeni Nabokov out for an afternoon swim? Why, it must be!
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