I'm not really one for properly mixing my interests and my location. You obviously know I'm a huge lover of movies. My tastes run the gamut from arthouse movies to Hollywood blockbusters and exploitation flicks. And I love foreign films too. And this is where I'm having a problem today. If you run in movie lover circles and mention Slumdog Millionaire, you're going to get a lively discussion going. But if you live in a heavily rural area populated largely by contractors and farmers, in other words a pretty conservative and mainstream group, and you mention Slumdog Millionaire, they will just stare at you with eyes filled with incomprehension.
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Those of you who have been hanging around this place for any significant part of the decade it's been running are well aware that I do love the Oscars. That is a completely uncool attitude to take but that's just the way it is. I am what I am.
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For the first time that I can remember, I didn't watch or listen to so much as a second of the Super Bowl. I am aware that the Steelers won the game, because people kept giving me updates. But I made zero effort to experience the game and that is a first for me. I love football dearly. And I'm not just trying to act like I'm too cool to watch it, because clearly I am not cool. Ask anyone. I'm also not saying that I didn't watch because I don't care about these particular areas the teams come from, as if somehow I'm in a position to slam Pittsburgh or Arizona. No. I didn't watch because I'm a bitter bastard and I'm still pissy that the NY Giants did not make it back to the Super Bowl. This is me being a bad loser. This is me throwing blame at the people responsible for this failure. That's right, I'm looking at you Plaxico.
Congratulations Pittsburgh. I'm sure you deserved it and that you won a hard fought game.
Shot himself in the leg. He shot himself in the leg. Are you kidding me?
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Last night I watched The Departed, which I fucking love. Normally I wouldn't swear in such a statement but somehow it seems appropriate when talking about that particular movie. Now, I've seen The Departed several times to date. Probably something like a half dozen times. The reasons are many. It is brilliantly written, wonderfully acted and confidently shot. Martin Scorsese and his merry band did a great job. But I can say that about a lot of movies and I don't find myself returning to them over and over again.
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Last night I watched the movie Mongol. I'm not really going to review it, but I definitely want to talk about it. A few weeks ago I discovered the podcast Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. History has always fascinated me, although like many students I didn't usually enjoy history classes. There are no doubt exceptions but most of the ones I took focused heavily on the memorization of dates and general themes. History is at its best when told as a good story. And that's what I love about Harcore History. Carlin picks a topic that interests him and then tells us a good story. He rarely moves in a straight linear fashion and even less often focuses on dates. He is much more interested in the stories and what all of it tells us about humanity. If history classes were taught in this style and with this sort of passion, students would never complain about taking history courses. They would look forward to them.
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I've mentioned my new netbook a number of times now but this may be one of my favorite moments with this thing yet. I'm sitting in the waiting room of a doctor's office and posting on the website. I love that. The convenience of this thing just completely changes the way I go about things. This used to be completely wasted time and now I can actually do something. Admittedly all I've done is publicly note that I can do something with this time, which doesn't quite count as doing something, but I'm just discovering the possibilities. I don't doubt how impressed you are by the awesomeness of this moment. It's not even necessary to thank me.
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Time management is the bane of my writing existence. Quite simply, I suck at it.
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My oldest son is obsessed with Wall-E. He has plenty of obsessions, so this by itself is not particularly remarkable. But Wall-E takes his imagination to places and heights his other obsessions don't quite reach. He's crazy about Herbie and Thomas the Tank Engine too. It's not the same though. He plays happily for hours with his Thomas trains. Occasionally he draws them too. He draws a lot of Herbie pictures as well. We have every Herbie movie on DVD and have seen them all many times. I'm not proud of this but if need be I can go into a fairly length discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the various Herbie films. For instance, Herbie Goes Bananas is clearly the weak sister of the series, which is actually a pretty rotten thing to say about it. The modern version, Herbie Fully Loaded, is mostly rendered tolerable by Lindsey Lohan's short skirts and tight shirts. That's a pretty weak endorsement but when your kid watches something on an endless loop, you'll grasp at any straw you can for sanity.
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3 AM is what I generally consider bedtime. Last night, when that time arrived I closed up what I was working on and headed for the bathroom before going to bed. And that's when I discovered there was no water. Which, considering the outside temperature of about 10 below zero, meant the pipes had frozen. Fuck.
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So I no sooner tell you that I'm working on a zombie movie than I go and jump to something else. In this manner I can be a bit maddening to work with. The idea is to keep as many balls in the air at once as possible so that when my brain switches gears, something that happens almost minute by minute it seems, there is something else to go to immediately.
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