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I love "word a day" lists… they're filled with such fun stuff sometimes. Like yesterday's A.Word.A.Day email with the very fun concept of Socratic Irony: A profession of ignorance in a discussion in order to elicit clarity on a topic and expose misconception held by another. (So now, the next time I pull this bit on Dani, I can even tell her what it's called! Not that it'll stop her from smacking me when she gets annoyed by it. But hey, that's part of the fun!) AND, in the same email, I get this cool quote, too! It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. —Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)

…whether The Chronicles of Riddick would get its sequels made, this should answer that question: "…Universal [Pictures, which is distributing the movie,] has ... been consistent with their wanting to see how this opening weekend [box office] did, and the second weekend, because the second weekend is a key to them to gauge drop off." (from the SciFi.com article " Twohy: Chronicles 2, 3 Planned ") Judging from the fact that it opened at number 2 (admittedly behind Harry Potter), dropped to #6 in its second weekend and entirely out of the top 10 in its third weekend, (not to mention that it's grossed just over $51 million—less than half of it's budget), it seems unlikely that Universal's buying into any sequels any time soon. It's too bad, too. As clunky as some of the Butcher's Bay stuff was, I really liked the ending and would have liked to see where it was going to go from there. The problem is, I think the "big picture" sto...

Why is it I never talk about the good movies? I mean, we saw Shrek 2 a couple of weeks ago and I loved it… had nearly as much fun as I did during the first one, can't wait to go back and see it again and see what else I catch, Puss 'n Boots is my favorite character of the summer so far… and yet, not one word in all these weeks. But I've got time for rants about The Day After Tomorrow and Van Helsing? What the hell is up with that? Ok, my resolution now is to start writing more about the movies I've LIKED that I've seen instead of just bitching about the ones that have sucked. I know, it's easier—and arguably, more FUN—to write about the bad ones. But maybe that's one of the things that make for good criticism… the ability to speak as eloquently about the good movies as the bad. 'Cause let's face it, anyone can trash a bad movie. So, a quick preview (both in theatres and on DVD): Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. How about...

Things must be getting back to normal! (If I ever get my PC set up in the new place, maybe I'll get back to blogging on a regular basis!) But in the meantime, from today's A.Word.A.Day mailing list: "The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself." —Richard Francis Burton, explorer and writer (1821-1890) A.Word.A.Day

Ok, so I tried to take the high road. Failing that, I opted for "if you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything ". But it's June 24th today and as I drove in to work, I STILL saw flags at half-mast. Isn't it time we get over it and move on? What is this, a national month of mourning? Let's face it, the man's been dead a couple of weeks now, we've had the funeral & memorial services & eulogies and he's been buried. Factor in the Alzheimer's, realizing he hasn't known his own name for the better part of the last 10 years, and you've got to admit the guy you're mourning is LONG GONE now. So let's put the flags back where they belong, put away the black armbands and get back to business as usual, huh? (oh god. As Chris points out in her comment to my post, it IS a freaking month of mourning, as per this announcement . I'm back to "no comment". There's just no point....

Like Fox News always taking the rabid, pro-Bush, conservative point of view? Then how do you explain their glowing review of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11? I mean, if THEY'VE Got good things to say about it, I'm thinking I may have to see it now and not wait for the DVD! But don't worry… these morons are more than willing to take on Mike's movie (sight unseen, I'm sure) as the "pro-Al-Queda propaganda" that they're convinced it is. (God, trying to slog through their fervently jingoistic dreck is quite the chore. Almost makes visiting the Fox News site tolerable.) Kinda makes me want to see it even more, you know?

mobile speed bump n. The city of Vancouver is exploring the idea of sanctioning a grass-roots traffic-calming program that enlists the silent majority of reasonable, rational, law-abiding drivers to stop being so silent. Instead they'd slap NEIGHBORHOOD PACE CAR stickers on their vehicles and set a highly visible example by rolling down Vancouver streets at lawful speeds. Try that in LA and it'd be an invitation to either get run off the road or shot… or both! And I'm not sure I wouldn't be one of the ones running these clowns off the road! (I know I wouldn't be one of the ones shooting, however. Sometime in my first month living in LA, after being cut-off one too many times in one day, I caught myself thinking, "if I had a gun, I'd shoot your ass". It wasn't till several minutes later that I realized: a) I'd actually had that thought run through my head, and b) it didn't seem strange at the time. It occurred to me at that point ...

It's kind of fun to watch the hack* director in action. Their career path is interesting, if not all that surprising… after all, one watches a good director's films and hopes—perhaps expects—that each one will get progressively better, meanwhile following the bad director's career with the fear that each film will be worse than the next. So it's probably not too surprising to find that, with each film, the hack director just becomes a bigger hack, latching onto those aspects of their previous works that they feel were the best parts (often mistakenly), blowing them up into bigger and bigger moments all at the service of producing a bigger, glossier and, ultimately, more meaningless (and usually worse) movie than their previous works. And we've got two glorious examples of the hack in action so far this summer. First off, of course, is Van Helsing… a turgid mess that I've already bashed here . But it's a prime example of what I'm talking a...

R. R., 40th President, is Dead No comment.

Ok, we've been pretty freaking busy moving this month so there's really been no time to post, but I saw this in my email this morning from The Word Spy and really HAD to say something… furkid n. A pet treated as though it were one's child. Also: fur-kid, fur kid. Example Citation: My name is Brenda Mejia and I'm owned by two Australian cattle dogs. I don't have kids, so I call my dogs my 'furkids.' They keep me as busy as a soccer mom. —Brenda Mejia, "Pet stories," The Desert Sun (Palm Springs, CA), April 30, 2004 All I have to say is that if ANYONE ever catches me referring to our cats as "furkids" you have my express permission to smack me in the face and tell me to snap out of it. "Furkids". Give me a break.

Ok, so I got on the Entertainment Weekly email list for their weekly box-office survey. They send out an email on Sunday or Monday, asking for your opinion on any of the week's recent releases. I, of course, got on this list just in time for me to stop going to movies nearly as often as I usually do (we've been KINDA BUSY, you know!?). SO I haven't had many chances to respond to their surveys. Well, I got one this week asking if I'd seen Troy or any of the other releases and I realized I hadn't gotten their email in a couple of weeks. Which meant that I'd missed my chance to weigh in on the utter wreck that was Van Helsing (a friend of mine described it as "craptastic". I can't think of a better word for it.) The biggest problem with this disaster is the simple fact that it tries too hard to be a videogame. No big surprise, Sommers & Co. worked hand-in-hand with the development team at Vivendi to make sure the game accurately reflected...

I've been bored with the templates Blogger offered in their last round of updates almost from day one, but I've just been too lazy (or too challenged by the thought of actually getting in and coding HTML) to do anything about it. So I'm really enjoying digging through all the new templates they're offering in this latest update to the service. There's also some cool stuff like a new "comments" option (I'm boing to be brave and enable those now… Quentin's going to have a field day with that one!) and profiles and such. I've got way too much fun stuff to play around with now. Now, if I can just get back to posting! (We're in the middle of buying a house and moving. I'm going to milk that excuse for all it's worth. I'll be posting again next month. No, really. I've got way too much to mouth off about to not be posting!)

The thing about movie channels like HBO and Showtime is that, when they buy the rights to show a movie, they buy the rights to show it A LOT. So, unless it's "prime time", you're apt to run into the same selection of movies pretty regularly. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Mr. Deeds (yes, they even show the bad ones a lot!). And this isn't necessarily a bad thing. If I'm just looking for something to have on in the background while I'm doing something else, a movie I've seen dozens of times is an easy choice, since I don't have to pay attention to follow it (and the movie channels are well aware of this behavior among their subscribers). So this morning I was killing a little time and looking for something on TV to do the killing and I switched on Attack of the Clones . And what strikes me watching one of the early scenes isn't how bad the movie is (we all know that, while it's marginally better than Phantom Menace, it still...

Ok, I know I've bitched about this before and I'm aware that most of the country doesn't seem to either care or notice, but isn't ANYBODY else tired of our "no fault" President? From embarrasing international misstep to gigantic cluster-fuck, whenever anything blows up in the Bush Administration's collective face, there's always someone stepping forward to take the blame and say they left the President out of the loop, forgot to mention it to him, didn't make it clear to him… whatever they need to say to make sure we all understand it wasn't George W. Bush's fault that we all look like gigantic a-holes to the rest of the world. This time it's Rumsfeld's turn , since he apparently didn't think it important enough to mention to the President that they were investigating reports of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. Which really begs the question of what the hell ARE they telling GW about these days? Pardon me for as...

Ok, I KNOW Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom and Eric Bana (how the hell did he get on this list, anyway?) are the real draw in Troy, but how much of a freaking unknown/nonentity of an actress must you be to play Helen of Troy (you know, "the face that launched a thousand ships") and not even get a MENTION on any of the billboards? Of course, I just looked at her "resume" on the Troy site and see that she's a former photo model from Paris who had her first role sometime last year. She's gotten a Ceasar nomination for one of the films she's done and she's got a few more coming this year. So maybe it's just that the marketing guys figure no one in the US would know or care who she is till they've seen the film. But still… not even a mention on the billboards. That's gotta hurt!

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician and author (1872-1970) (Thanks to Wordsmith.org's " A.Word.A.Day " for this particular observation.)

I saw an article a couple of weeks ago talking about how the traditional "summer movie season" keeps creeping earlier into the year. Traditionally, summer movie season—that time of year when style triumphs over substance and incidental things like coherent plots and meaningful subject matter give way to explosions, effects and bad comedy—starts Memorial Day weekend. But in the past few years these big, bad action films have escaped their cage and started showing up before the summer season's truly here. So after not making it to a single movie in months (I'm not kidding, either—the last movie I saw in a theatre was Along Came Polly !) we finally got out to the movies a couple of weeks ago. And what was our great choice for getting back to the movies? Freaking Hellboy . Understand, I wasn't terribly interested in the movie to begin with. I've never read the comic and there just wasn't anything there that hooked me. I like Ron Perlman and think i...

I bought a new Mustang Convertible last month (40th Anniversary in black, of course) and have probably driven with the top up maybe a half-dozen times since I bought the car. Let's face it, it's Southern California. If there were ever a place to drive a convertible, this is it. And what I've noticed in my 6 or 7 weeks of driving my new convertible is how many losers there are out there driving convertibles with the top up! I mean, what's the point of having this cool car if you're not putting the top down every chance you get? (I'll admit that I might take things a little to the extreme here… if the temperatures over 60 and it's not immediately threatening rain, the top's probably down.) But this morning, as I'm driving to work, it's a BEAUTIFUL day—7:30 in the morning, it's already over 70 degrees, crystal clear and you can't even notice the smog at this point. And STILL I pass 3 different people, driving their convertibles with ...

One of those inane "slice of life" commercials was just on with a guy rambling on about sitting in his big overstuffed chair with his son and how it's "just what he needed to be doing" right about then… holding his son, cuddling him, "sniffing his head". This was immediately followed by the commercial's message: " Jockey , What's in Your Comfort Zone". Doesn't anyone pay attention to these things? Hasn't anyone ever heard of the idea of juxtaposition ? I mean, come on, dad sniffing his son's hair immediately followed by the image of jockey shorts? Pay attention people. Really.

One of the good things about the KROQ Kevin & Bean morning show is their derisive appreciation for crap television shows. Basically, they watch the bad stuff so I don't get subjected to it. Last Sunday, the highest rated TV show among 18-49 year olds was The Nick & Jessica Variety Hour . Right off the top, I can't stand these two. Jessica Simpson is a brainless, self-centered pop princess and Nick Lachey is the has-been boy-band doormat of a husband to this vacuous blond, so I've got no time for either one of them. It stands to reason then, that I skipped this waste of time of a TV show. And I cannot tell you HOW glad I am that I did. KROQ's morning team couldn't fall over themselves fast enough to mock and abuse this show and, judging from the clips they played… DAMN, did it deserve the mockery! First off, there's the "heart of the 70's" guest star list (Mr. T? Johnny Bench? Kenny Rogers, Kermit the Frog & Miss Piggy?!?) Ne...