I recently added Sam Nock to my FB. Honestly, I had some trepidations about doing so, as she seemed to despise me the last time I spoke to her, for reasons that were never given or explained to me. Despite those concerns, I think it was possibly one of the better choices I've made, simply because I finally have someone intellectually stimulating to talk to.

I mean no offense to anyone else with this statement.

Lisa, you are brilliant and wonderful, but part of what makes you wonderful is that we've got alot in common, including our outlook on the world, for the most part. While we talk about and, uh, do stimulating things, it's pretty hard to have a debate with someone who agrees with you 90% of the time. Hell, even when we argue about little shit, we end up laughing or agreeing anyway.

Similarly, Lindsay, you are highly intelligent, and if I remember right, usually a riot to hang out with. But I don't think you really have much feeling about politics, metaphysics, etc. etc. It's not a bad thing - it's just not your thing. And, to be completely honest, you don't argue - you just get pissed off and go quiet. I might be wrong, but this is how it seems to me, anyway.

The rest of my friends (which, let's face it, now consist of Paul and Brianna, one of whom I don't really have anything in common with, and the other just makes me sigh constantly) don't seem to care about the same things I care about, and if they do, have never said anyhting about it to me. Every time I say something remotely debatable or, for lack of a better term, everyone just shuts up or agrees with me. They lack passion, or at least passion for things I'm aware of.

Sam and I agree on the fundamentals (the FB debate, at least the public part, is a little rough, but I assure you we're debating, not just arguing), but are on radically different sides in regards to most else. I personally can see this leading to a hella lot of interesting conversations that I just don't get to have with anyone since I stopped seeing my Dad on a daily basis.

I know it doesn't maybe seem blogworthy, but I'm rather happy about it anyway.

I haven't posted in a while, having spent my time writing reviews for all the shitty movies I've seen. That blog will be opening sooner or later, once there's a few reviews up.

Speaking of movies, I'm watching "Fright Night". It's about this kid who thinks his neibour is a vampire, yadda yadda.

What I'm wondering is, seeing as how the police are well aware that he thinks this, how they're going to explain killing three people (thus far). I mean, yes, they WERE vampires and ghouls and all manner of nasty things, but seeing as how they disolve or turn human when they die, it seems like it might be sort of hard to justify stabbing them with stakes and such. I'd at least hide the bodies or something - having your mom come home to find your ex-best friend impaled on part of your coffee table just seems like a lame situation to be in.

Lisa's cat and I have reached a truce. He'll stop being a little shit, and I'll stop thinking about how he would taste with a little BBQ sauce.

Don't have much else to say, just thought I should state that I didn't end up killing the little fucker.

Fuck your cat. Seriously. We live in a tiny little 6 room house without any internal door. A cat is a semi-domesticated carnivore, and completely useless for people like us. I honestly don't even find the little piece of shit cute anymore, and the fact that putting a .22 in his head would probably get us kicked out is the only reason he's still in this house. So figure it out. Find some way to keep him out of my fucking face for a little while, or I will erect my own "cat fence", which will most likely be hooked up to a wall outlet and could double as a border fence for some Somali refugee camp.

A dog is at least useful in that it guards the house, not to mention listens to what you tell it to do. These are the sort of things I want in a pet: Obedience, caring, and companionship, none of which should be a whole lot to ask for out of an at most semi-sentient animal who relies on me for it's survival. If I wanted to have a shitty, unsanitary animal pissing me off, breaking my shit, ignoring me except to attack me, and going through my stuff, I would have had a kid.

As is, if you don't sort your cat out, I'm going to start making friends with just-off-the-boat Chinese people.

Literally everything I've done today has led me back to this guy for some reason. I shit you not, it is more than a little freaky.



I realize the sound quality is literally from the turn of the century, and it is rather nice singing, but I gotta say, that REALLY doesn't seem like it would be worth loosing your balls over.

For those who haven't happened on the subject already, the castrati were male opera singers who were, well, castrated. The castration was done before puberty, in order to insure the singer never lost that ultra-high soprano sound to a nasty thing like natural development. This was very common at one point, believe it or not, as many poor families with musically gifted young boys could easily perform the castration themselves, then sell their "talent" to a church or something similar. The fellow in the video was the last of the castrati, nowadays the high male soprano is reached through intensive voice training.

For some reason, I can't shake the feeling I learned all this from Paul Harvey somehow.

What else? I don't understand tofu. I'm watching this movie, and the protaganist is a vegitarian. In the scene I just saw, he conviced his buddy to fry up a big block of tofu for him on his resturant's grill.

This raises a few questions for me:

1. Who eats anything that comes in a brick, when it's pretty common knowlege that anything shaped like a brick sucks ass? Just off the top of my head, here's a few "brick" foods that come to mind: Spam, cat food, imitation processed chicken. So, tofu gets the joy of being catagorized alongside pig entrails, chicken entrails, and leftover bits of Mexicans (or whatever else is cheaper than real chicken). Yum.

2. You COOK tofu? Really? I mean, it's soy bean or some shit, right? I can't really imagine how cooked tofu is as opposed to raw, but I imagine it would all be a goopy, flavorless mess no matter how you prepare it. I've had soy milk before, so, quite honestly, the taste of burnt shitty soy milk is sort of what I expect it would be like.

3. How many people walk around with a complete (but raw) supper? Furthur more, how many people have you ever seen walk into a resturant and insist the chef cook with the ingredients they've brought in? Sort of makes me think lack of meat in your diet makes you lose it a little.


Of course, I could probably spend forever questioning this movie in itself. Do they really make prosthetic meat tenderizing hands? Do all women really cream themselves over you when you nearly let them get raped? Does being a vegitarian because you "love animals" balance out the fact that you spend ALOT of time in a slaughterhouse? Is treating your voodoo form of the plague really as easy as just killing people on a subway, cutting of a boil for each one you kill, and storing that boil in a jar full of barbicide? Etc. etc.

I gotta stop watching so many movies, or life should become more like movies. One or the other, please. I'm actually starting to get a bit annoyed with how unrealistic absolutely everything is in the media. I nearly said nowadays, but let's face it, even before Marconi patented his radio, and Herr Hurst waged his propaganda paper wars, the media has been more or less completely full of shit.

I had something else I wanted to write about, but I can't remember right now. I've blogged an awful lot in the last few days, so perhaps it's for the best. I hate being out of weed. I focus too much.

I still can't think of anything to write about "Finding Forrester". I really don't connect with this movie, or even like it a whole bunch. Not to mention that, at least in the case of the main character, there really isn't any actual character growth in the movie. I'd rather write about character development in a movie like Saw, which features virtual no character development, but at least doesn't bother pretending to.

Even writing about a video game storyline seems like it would be easier. I really just don't like this movie.

Here is a plot summary, as I have watched this piece of shit about 30 times now"

Jamal is a stereotypical black kid living in the Bronx. He does very poorly in school, and hopes to play basketball some day. This changes as a result of two things:

1. He turns out to be brilliant, something that apparently went unnoticed throughout the first 17 years of his life, but which comes to light after he takes some type of aptitude test at school. This, plus his basketball ability, earn him a spot at some posh academy.

2. While breaking into Sean Connory's house, he forgets his backpack when Connory startles him. His backpack contains some writing (no, you don't actually get to hear any of this "Brilliant" prose, excepting a little bit in the last 5 minutes of the movie), which Connory, a reclusive author, reads and marks. Jamal goes back for his bag, and becomes friends with the old man (who apparently forgets that he had to chase the guy out with a knife only a day earlier).

After that, he starts to excel at both basketball, and writing. I think the character development is in here somewhere, though it's horribly done, as Jamal basically did both those things at the start of the movie. While the relationship with Connory improves his writing skills, and does indeed help change Connory's character, it really doesn't do shit for Jamal's development, most of which apparently happens off screen.

Nothing much really happens. Besides the first and last 20 minutes, the movie may as well have been a series of "Jamal workin' the typewriter" and "Jamal shootin' hoops" montages, since virtually no important dialog takes place, and the story doesn't advance. At one point, Jamal is walking down the street at night, and a cop car passes him with the lights flashing. Time slows ever so slightly as Jamal glaces over his shoulder at the 5-0. Starved for some sort of plot development, both Lisa and I came up with what turned out to be wild and radical suppositions for what was about to happen next. Did something happen to the black guy he lives with (alluded to being his brother, though being a movie about a black guy, the word "brother" is somewhat difficult to put into a specific context), or his moms? Is Jamal about to be hasseled over nothing, potentially destroying his future? The suspense builds, and the scene changes to... Typewriter montage. This is arguably the most exciting moment in the movie, on par with the moment you think Jamal may have found a rival on his own basketball squad (who doesn't come back in the movie after his first appearance).

The movie more or less climaxes with Jamal missing two penalty shots, which is supposed to show he's changed his focus from basketball to writing. As he previously sunk fifty identical shots earlier in the movie, it's supposedly implied he intentionally threw the game, something I have issue with for two reasons:

1. He denies throwing the game untill the very end of the movie. That said, when he goes to play basketball with his friends (who have also developed, becoming more accepting of his literary ways)as the credits roll at the end of the film, he sucks horribly, and can't sink a shot. This leads me to think he's just bullshitting Connory, and the more I think about it, the less I can distinctly remember him even clearly stating he missed on purpose.

2. It doesn't really make much sense. By throwing the game, he risked getting kicked out of school, something only prevented by Connory finally leaving his apartment (moar developmentz!) and coming to the school to back Jamal up. Besides that, he also pissed off a ton of people. Had he won, it's not like he wouldn't have been allowed to write shit anymore. He just would have also been a state champion basketball player, as well as a "brilliant" writer. To compound this, his reasons for throwing the game more or less come down to his dislike of his english teacher and girlfriend's dad.

Really, when I watch this movie, it reminds me of the time I tried to make a bong out of galvanized piping, a socket set, and this really cool skull jar I used to have. While it was a wicked and ambitious concept, it ended up being loosely thrown together due to poor materials and lack of specific plans, and impatience. It turned out to be neat looking but completely non-functional as a smoking device. This movie is that bong. It aims high, with a good message and all, but it's like they forgot to plan how to get from point A to point B, and I honestly have to wonder if they even bothered to write a script, given that there are maybe 30 sentences within the entire movie that actually relate to anything that's going on.

Alternatively, it's alot like American History X, provided you either end the movie with everyone still being a skinhead, or only watch the first and last 15 minutes of it, ignoring the excitment of a gunshot in the last five or so.

I don't know. Watching this movie the first time was as stimulating as trying to escape a wheel-chain bound zombie. Twice was like trying to find meaning in the raindrops on your windshield during a mushroom trip, and now that I'm on my 10th or so time around, I really wish I could "Find Forrester" myself and kick his ass, as I've seen this shitty film enough times to probably successfully make an intelligent and "true to home" porno spoof out of it (which would be titled Fucking Forrester, after the numerous times I've thought exactly that), and still can't finish this essay.

Both Tumbler Ridge and Dawson Creek have been featured pages on the wiki now. The world must be a really boring place.

Everyone sells out their values eventually. This has been proven by virtually everyone I know.

I personally think it's better to just have anthropomorphic values, which aren't in any way solid, to begin with. Yes, you seem a little unstable at first, but when you're the only person you know who is anything like what you've been saying you'd like to be like, I think you're doing ok.

Success is pretty relative when you think about it.


In other news, it's really nice being able to BBQ in november.

I just came across this:

http://news.yahoo.com/part-sun-turns-stormy-benevolent-monster-213318304.html

while killing time waiting for a download. I don't know if you've heard me mention this before, but solar cycles are one of the few things that lend some merit to the 2012 theory. I don't really recall the specifics right now, having just smoked a bowl, but solar flares strip atmosphere, or could massively irradiate the earth, or something similar. Contrary to what the article says, we've actually been experiencing unprecedented increased in solar flares in the proper times recently, and around 2012 is supposed to be the epoch. So, stock up on spam and dehydrated bananas and shit.

We use alot of electricity at our house, because, well... electricity is what seperates us from the cavemen? Anyway, we always leave lights on, have two big TVs, electric heat, fridge, oven, and water heater, etc. Cause of this, I've been really following the "smart meter" thing lately.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, smart meters are the new power meters being installed in British Columbia and Ontario, replacing whatever non-digital meters we were using before. They measure your power usage exactly, as in, when you turn on a light, it measures the 60w or 300w or whatever change in your power usage instantly, so you can be billed acordingly.

This sounds pretty cool, but unfortunately no one's power bill seems to do anything but increase after having the non-optional new meters installed. Add in the controversy over them allegedly letting off deadly radiation, and the smart meters don't really seem that nice.

I personally just can't get over the fact that no one is worried about the potential "invasion of privacy", considering the big fuss made over those airport x-ray things just a little while ago. You know which one I mean; a bunch of obese people got all whiney because the scanning machine could see how many rolls they had and their veiny nipples and so forth, showing the world (of x-ray technicians, anyway) that they are secretly overweight piggies.

Really, a smart meter can be just as bad. Think about it. My fridge has a little 10 watt or whatever lightbulb in it. Every time I open it, that light comes on, and my smart meter picks up a 10w change in my power use. When I open the freezer, I let cold air out, setting off the thermostat and starting up the electrically powered process that cools my freezer back off. Turning on the oven to bake my carb-loaded curley fries uses ridiculous amounts of energy, etc. etc. I could take this even farther, to the point where a smart meter picks up the amount of energy used by a scanner during my checkout at a grocery store, giving the power company a loose estimation of how much I'm buying there, but I think you get the idea.

So really, a smart meter gives away that you're a fatty with veiny nipples just as much as an x-ray machine. And when you stop to consider that a record now exists of what time you watch your TV, turn your computer on, what time you turn off the lights and go to bed or leave the house, etc. etc., you think more people would be more concerned.

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In other news, I don't really like "Deadliest Warrior". It's one of those really simple shows for mass consumption that attempt to show a "scientific" way of testing something that isn't really that scientific. I'm watching 'Pirates Vs. Knights', for example, and it looks like the knight is gonna kick ass because he's got thick steel armour. What this doesn't take into account is what the fight would be like on a boat, which is where a pirate is most likely to be found. Yeah, you can take a pistol shot point blank, but that much metal strapped to your body makes it REALLY hard to swim. It's also pretty hard to come up with some way of scientifically representing a fight between a guy who's trained his whole life for war and a guy who could have just said "fuck it!" and jumped on a boat two weeks prior.