you've read about it here
now get it here: the gray album
"DJ Danger Mouse remixed the vocals from Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' White Album and called his creation The Grey Album."
it's good. try some.
i haven't been having much fun. i've been out in the field. another one of those projects where i go out and supervise things. not that the people doing the actual work really need to be supervised. they know what they're doing. they're not doing anything all that difficult. and, no, they don't need any help. so i really just end up standing around watching. then i go back to my truck and read something. and then i go back and watch them. and then i hit my head against a wall. then i go home as the sun is setting.
anyway, that was my week. i didn't even get to watch the basketball games that are going on, since they come on at 2pm, and that's when i'm far too busy watching people do stuff to sewer manholes. yes.
so, being a fan of basketball, and of those brilliant mtv reality shows, i found page 2's quote about the eastern conference final's rasheed wallace just wonderful:
One other question on 'Sheed: Have you ever wondered what he's like in other aspects of his life? Like if you were playing Scrabble on him, and you used a word like "queue," and he never heard of it -- which seems highly possible -- would he jump back from the table, throw his hands in the air and start stomping around the room and laughing sarcastically to himself until you picked up the tiles? I need to know these things. And can you imagine Rasheed guest-starring on a reality-show like "Real World/Road Rules Challenge," screaming at Coral because it's her turn to go into the inferno and she's trying to back out? We need to explore the studio space with this guy. Seriously.
and karl malone is still a horrible, horrible bitch. (thanks, bones.)
karl malone, you are a dirty, dirty bitch.
i really want the lakers to lose. sure, there's the drama about karl and gary taking pay cuts to go to LA and win a championship. but, hey, why don't you think about mr. skinny-man reggie miller? he's in his 16th year in the league and hasn't won a championship. and he stuck with his team. no selling out here. i know new york fans hate him for being the spoiler year after year, but really, shouldn't he get more love in a team sport than people who left their teams in search of rings for themselves?
remember back in the day when malone and dennis rodman were in wrestlemania? that was retarded. dennis rodman faded into obscurity already. can't malone do that already?
i want to see a pacers-timberwolves final.
and is there anything funnier than seeing that fat-guy oliver miller drive the lane and dunk over someone? i can't think of anything.
so i have spent the last week in recovery. i spent half days at work and slept a lot. i was even in the hospital for a night. you'd think that sick people would get beds that are a little more comfortable. you'd be wrong.
anyway, now that everything's better (except my poor, dying car), i'll give quick synopses of the movies that i watched while lying in bed:
harry potter 1 and 2 (the special stone. or sorcerer's stone. or something, and the something of something something. respectively.)
reasons to like it:
-that old guy who's the head wizard. he has a certain type of inner peace that is probably derived from being really, really old.
-the little witch girl who's one of harry's best friends who knows everything. she's a hottie.
-professor snape. he's played by such a good actor. even when he's evil, he makes me giggle.
reasons to not care so much:
-i read the book.
-it's fairytale land.
-harry's a big, big dork.
-snooty british accent: somehow, if mild, it's really attractive on a woman. but on a guy, it makes you want to kick him.
the last samurai
reasons to like it:
-the scenery is beautiful.
-japanese people are funny.
-tom cruise gets the crap beat out of him a few times throughout the movie.
-tom cruise does not get the girl. (well, yeah, not really).
-the take-home message (whether or not you realize it) is that white people are evil and stupid.
-cool battle strategy planning.
reasons to not care so much:
-everybody dies in the end. (and if they're not killed in battle, they kill themselves.)
-not enough hot chicks.
-not one of those "ha ha" kind of funny movies.
lost in translation
reasons to like it:
-bill murray is a genius.
-the white girl is kind of pretty.
-girl:"why do they mix up the R's and L's?"
-bill murray: "just to shake it up. you know...for kicks. somebody's gotta make them laugh. We're not taking care of it."
reasons to not care so much:
-it's kind of slow moving.
-a kind of ambiguous and amorphous ending.
-no explosions.
about schmidt
reasons to like it:
-none
reasons to not care so much:
-all.
-it's a depressing tale of an old man who's wife dies shortly after he retires. his lame and ungrateful daughter marries a goon, and the man sits in the hot tub with a fat and saggy naked kathy bates.
-a horribly slow and painful movie that leaves you feeling empty and upset about having lost 2 hours of your life.
-please please please, america, do not see this movie.
endless summer
reasons to like it:
-it's about surfing.
-it gives a sketch of what i want i'd like to do with my life: travel around the world surfing in goofy short shorts.
-hilariously politically incorrect comments about native indigenous peoples.
reasons to not care so much:
-it's old and grainy.
-you don't care about surfing and you're afraid of the water.
-you're dead inside and hate puppies and/or balloons.
ok. so that's all for one weekend.
a movie i watched a week ago that was amazing: big fish. no pro/con list here. it's just good. go see it.
so i went to this website: www.hawaiianwatershots.com and clicked through to some surf pictures. (it's the site of this guy who takes surf pics of normal, everyday surfers at places i regularly surf. i haven't yet found any pics of myself on the page, but i've found pics of people i surf with out there.)
anyway, he does this cool thing where he disables the right-click abilities. he also seems to disable the cut-and-paste functions while those picture webpages are open. (i couldn't even take a screenshot). you can't even view source code. this guy is good.
so i'm asking for your help, america. i'm sure one of you (probably one of my too-smart mit classmates) can figure out a way around this. there are some pictures of some really hot chicks that i wouldn't mind as a desktop background.
and then, in this age of suing 12 year old girls who download free music, i ask you whether this is illegal or not, saving images on the web to my personal computer? i mean, they're free to view, but not to save? and do his attempts to make it difficult (or, in his dreams, impossible) to download them, mean that it becomes illegal to download them? what rights does he really have, when posting images to such a public forum like the web? and what rights to i have to access this stuff?
or i could just pay $20 for him to email me a pic.
right.
so the mexican government is saying that their air force has seen UFOs. they saw them and came out with video on monday. i heard about it briefly on the morning tv news. and on the radio on the drive to work. but nothing on cnn.com. and only on a few pages, and never any in-depth reporting.
is it because of the beheading and rummy? or is it some big cover up? i think you know...
so i can't draw well at all. i can sketch out diagrams that people can understand only once in a while. i found this site, wetcanvas, that has an amazing forum of posted images of artwork. it almost motivated me to learn to draw. but then i realized how i'd probably be discouraged by my suckiness and quit. so i might as well save money or pens and paper. or i can just use stuff from work.
anyway, take a look at this guy's hand-drawn rendering of jennifer aniston. it looks like an actual black and white picture. it's pretty amazing.
so i just bought the Endless Summer dvd. it's pretty good.
then, this morning, bones sends me this: (from wired.com)
Endless Summer: on demand.
i think it's a sign. i'm changing my career path. things will be much, much better.
damn you, big mac!
so you've maybe heard of this movie called Super Size Me. it's documentary-type film about a guy who eats nothing but mcdonalds for a month. it supposedly follows him while he gains a bunch of weight, loses his sex drive, and just generally falls to pieces.
"oh no!" you're saying. or, depending what you're previous take on fast food was, you're saying "oh good! finally documented proof that fast food is evil."
but then you can read this article:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/032504F.html
and you learn that not only did the guy only eat mcdonalds, but he also stopped working out; he "even cut down on normal walking".
the article also adds up the calories that he eats:
"The math of weight gain is simple. Someone Spurlock's size can eat 2,500 to 3,000 calories a day and maintain his weight. In the movie, he eats 5,000 to 5,500 calories a day. Nutritionists calculate that a man gains roughly a pound for every 3,500 extra calories, so roughly every three days, Spurlock overeats his way to an extra two pounds or more."
this seems like another push in the movement blaming our world's obesity problems on large fast food corportations. if you read this article, however, you can see that there's probably a lot of camera tricks (or eating tricks, or rectal exam tricks [as discussed in the article]) that are what's making the most vivid, and maybe misleading, arguments.
i just don't buy the idea that someone should blame mcdonalds for their obesity. some people even file lawsuits to this effect. and while, in my newfound maturity, i concede that the super tasty mcdonalds food is probably not the heathiest around, the blame for the abscence of my chisled abs lies not on the big mac, but on me.
i'm reminded of something i read somewhere. (ok, maybe i made it up, i can't remember):
"ok. you might not have enough money to get a gym membership. but you do have enough money to do some situps."
- - - - -
whenever it was my father's turn to feed us kids, he would take us to mcdonalds. (there was a span of time where he instead would take us the cheap corner gas station for a jumbo hotdog and a 32oz coke for $.99, but that offer only lasted a summer. or something).
he seemed to love mcdonalds. and, being a doctor, his endorsement of that eating style really should have gotten us a lot of free extra value meals.
in 8th grade, our silly school made us take home economics, which sounds like something legitimate but really is a just fancy name for learning cooking and cleaning. anyway, they had us keep a log of what we ate and how many calories we were consuming. that particular week, i ended up eating at mcdonalds 4 times. it was probably higher than my average, but not something totally out of the ordinary for my childhood.
the teacher seemed mildly outraged. "how can you do this?!" she asked me. "what do your parents say?!"
i replied citing the speech my father would give to my brother when he would ask about the nutritional value of mcdonalds:
"see, ms. whateverhernamewas, my father's a doctor. and he tells me that mcdonalds is really good for a growing kid. cause you're brain is made of cheese." luckily, she ignored me and just told the class that they shouldn't eat at mcdonalds nearly as much as i do.
my father's point, if i understand it correctly, is that your brain is made up of fats and lipids and stuff fairly similar biochemically to deep fried things. and if you're a kid, you're brain is developing and growing and making and reinforcing all these electrochemical connections. and if you only eat nuts and berries and twigs and leaves, your brain maybe is not going to get enough of the energy and building blocks it needs to make you smart. it's brain food. sure, i probably didn't need ALL the fat that was there, but isn't it better to have more brain food than less?
and look at what happened. now i'm smart and everyone else is stupid.
thanks, dad.
so i was watching the movie "unbreakable" last night. it was pretty good. that director, m. knight shamalamadingdong, is pretty good. i like him.
anyway, the movie's about this regular guy (bruce willis) who is the only survivor of this horrible train crash. and very, very slowly, he figures out that he's kind of a superhero. well, he's a superhero only because he can get the crap beat out of him and he's fine. that, and the fact that he can bench over 500 pounds. woah. oh, and he will probably use his powers of unbreakable-ness to do good, instead of evil. thanks, bruce.
anyway, he's talking to samuel l. jackson in the film, and they're trying to figure out why bruce is all unbreakable and sam jackson's character is entirely breakable (he has the brittlest of brittle bones). then either i think it, or one of the characters say it, that the lord works in mysterious ways.
that got me thinking. he doesn't always work in mysterious ways, does he? are those ways mysterious in the same way that U2 is talking about in the song with the girl who moves in mysterious ways?
and why is it that god gets to work in mysterious ways? why can't other things, like...math, work in mysterious ways?
i tried it on a friend of mine. i told him something. he asked why. i said, "you know, physics works in mysterious ways."
he was neither amused nor impressed.
kind of the way i am, now that this post is over.
hershey's new caramel kisses. brilliant.
well, they're a certain type of brilliance.
the kind of brilliance akin to outkast's "hey ya" song:
you first hear/eat it and fall in love.
then you want to hear/eat it again and again.
then, it kind of gets old.
then, you want to vomit.
so i gave blood yesterday. my first time ever. i felt like a good person. traffic lights changed to green for me afterward. there was this feeling of good karma around me. that only really lasted a few hours, though. and it might have been just the light-headedness of being a pint low on blood.
but there are signs that my pint of blood went to save three lives. THREE! am i helping the overall wellbeing of the world? or am i merely contributing to the problem that is global over population? either way, they wrapped my elbow with this red gauze tape that made me look pretty hard-core, if you don't mind me blowing my own horn.
i thought i was all tough and strong because i felt perfectly fine after giving my blood. i felt fine even before eating the free doughnuts and juice. then i jogged the 30 feet to my car. i made it to the car fine. but i did have to catch my breath for a minute. then i went home and took the best nap ever. EVER.