April 2007 Archives

Last night, I was having dinner with my friend Andrea and her friend Angela at the Thai BBQ Palace on Ventura in Studio City (I had the crispy duck). As we were leaving, we passed by one of those big yellow signs that they use around Los Angeles to help movie and television crews to the locations of their shoots. These signs are usually around 30"x20" will have some name and an arrow pointing in the direction that you are supposed to go. Sometimes, if it is a really famous show, they try to throw you off using some abbreviation. Other times, they just use the name of the show.

In this case, the sign said "AMP" and since those were the initials for my friend, I reached up to get the sign off of the pole. Normally I wouldn't just take someone's sign, but we had seen what looked like a casting call as we were walking to the restaurant and we figured that it was over by now. We were all kind of wondering what this casting call was, because it looked like a bunch of random skanks standing in front of a Bank of America in Studio City. And if you know The Valley, seeing a bunch of random skanks milling about for no apparent reason is not out of the ordinary, casting call or not.

We were almost to our car when somebody shouts "What are you doing with my sign! Hey, I need that!". It turns out that the casting call was for the new Anna Nicole movie starring Willa Ford. All of those girls that were dressed like hookers in front of the BofA were recruited as extras. They were going to be filming a recreation of the Playboy Mansion, and they were still thirty girls short of having a full house. Andrea and Angela were seriously thinking about becoming extras in what is sure to be one of the greatest movies of the century, but ultimately decided to pass.

As for me, I was intrigued, but as there would be no nudity, I decided to go home and finish the rest of the first season of Weeds on DVD.

On my commute this morning, I nearly hit some guy on San Vincente as he was crossing the street. Of course, he wasn't using the crosswalk. What was worse was that this jab decided to jaywalk about twenty feet away from the crosswalk, so it was completely unnecessary. What's worse than that is that this guy was a doctor, so he should have been smart enough to use the crosswalk twenty feet away or at least rich enough to have his assistant go get his Starbuck's for him. Who knows, perhaps he believed that being so close to the Emergency Room, he was playing with pretty good odds.

A few weeks ago, I posted about my Netflix addiction and asked people to be my friend. So far it has been very interesting. You get to see what movies your friends have rated, as well as what they have in their cue. If we weren't friends anyway, this would be great stalker material. IndustryMonkey/TV Insider and I must be long lost relatives because our tastes are 92% similar. Three other people have at least 70% similarity which means that if they were to drop over unannounced, there is a good chance at least one of the three movies I have at home will be to their liking. HoneyBunny is only a 49% match, but maybe she'll stick around for the popcorn.

UPDATE: Yay T-Bag! He is now in second place, and it looks like our first movie night will be a Resident Evil double feature.

We take our beer pong very seriously at Dartmouth. It is the main form of weekend evening (and weekday evening) entertainment for a majority of the campus. It's even sparked research by members of the anthropology department (Prof Alverson is awesome, BTW). The large amount of beer always affords some good stories, as illustrated in the video above. I am really glad that nobody videotaped me playing pong, because I wouldn't want everybody to think less of me when they realized how often I practiced the "boot and rally" method over the course of my career.

And if you really want to get nostalgic, see if you can spot any jerks you know in in this video.

First of all, I cribbed the title of this post from the person who gave me this link. When I read the article and saw under the caption that it investigated "suspicious deaths" of journal writers, I thought that it was like some sort of online CSI that solved murders or something. Then I read the group was called fake_lj_deaths and realized it was a group devoted to finding people who faked their deaths online. WTF?

Apparently, lots of people fake their deaths online, and they use the example of one online community where somebody faked a marriage/spouse, the miscarriage of that married spouse, the death of a cat, and finally, the fake death of his fake spouse. It made me wonder how many people on Mydeathspace.com are faking as well.

Being online a lot really gives lots of people a chance to become smarter, better looking, better educated, and more successful than they really are. On the whole I believe that when most people find a community online, they are for the most part honest, especially after an initial comfort stage comes in. Except for age; nobody wants to admit that.

There will always be people who jump right in to a community, and some will always lurk. For the most part, people online are fairly normal and share what happens to them with their online friends like they would with anybody they knew in real life. Therefore, I find it bizarre that a person who could enjoy augment so many parts of their personality would do something so strange as to fake their deaths. With so much real tragedy out in the world, it just seems kind of fucked up.

I remember seeing the movie Dead Presidents when I was in high school. It was brutal and violent, but it did have a lasting impression on me for a couple of reasons. First, the soundtrack is AWESOME. Probably the most-played CD in my collection for at least a couple of years. The second was the bad ass car: a 1960s Lincoln Continental.

The Continental is probably famous to most people because JFK was shot while riding in one, but the first memorable moment for me was in the Isaac Hayes video of "Walk on By" that played at the beginning of the movie, and I have loved the car ever since. It made a very successful comeback in The Matrix as well. This car was absolutely made for the gangsta lean. The best part about this car is that it came in sedan and convertible form.

It's hard to pick, but I would take a convertible, probably one from 1964. Hopefully my memories of the movie (I only saw it once, I just loved the soundtrack) are correct and it was the Continental in the film, but even if it was a Cadillac or an Oldsmobile. The slab sided Lincoln is the one for me.

In general, I can't stand people who think things British things are better just because they originate in England. Yes there is Madonna and Gwyneth, but I am also taking about the people who will only watch BBC America because they have convinced themselves American television is not smart or sophisticated enough. I think they're parents just never let them watch Magnum P.I. or Knight Rider when they were younger.

That being said, there is a lot of great stuff that comes from the BBC and we get parts of it on BBC America. I enjoy the old reruns Are You Being Served? and new (to me) episodes of Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, but the best thing on BBCA is Silent Witness. Each episode is two hours, which allows for a lot more thought to be put into each case, which allows you to get deeper into the mystery. Definitely check this one out.

Even if you didn't own the board game Mousetrap when you were a kid, this is pretty cool and if you are any where near the San Mateo fairgrounds, you can see it in action. If you actually owned the game "Mousetrap", the only thing you ever did with it was build the little contraption and watch it work. All told, you could probably get one or two minutes worth of solid fun every few months until you lost one of the pieces. This one should have much better replay value considering the end result is not a falling cage, but a falling safe. I so wish that they had one of these for Office Space.

I love Netflix. Overall, it is cheaper than DVD rentals and the turnaround time for getting my next movies is only a couple of days after I send in my return. I have used it to catch up on classics that I have never seen (like the original Gone in 60 Seconds - overrated if you ask me), great movies that I for some reason never saw in the theater (The Departed) and my favorites that I would like to see again (Magnolia). Yes, I can see a lot of these on HBO, Showtime, or whatever, but with a DVD plus an upconverting DVD player, you really get much better quality than anything on broadcast that isn't actually HD.

However, the reason why I got Netflix is that I love SciFi, and there are just so many movies out there that I never got to see and don't pop up enough for me to record in their natural state (i.e., not edited for content, to fit my screen, or time alloted). Case in point Mission to Mars. So many people hated that movie, said it ripped off from Kubrick, etc. I thought it was enjoyable! It was average science fiction, but it looked great in 1080i, and I think it did an interesting job using the Face on Mars idea to explain life on the Red Planet. Besides, as Gary Sinise-led science fiction goes, it's ten times better than Impostor.

On the other hand. I also rented Aeon Flux and that really fucking sucked. Still, it has not prevented me from placing The Core in my queue.

BTW, does anybody use Netflix friends? If you have Netflix, I am always open for recommendations.

Answer me a question. Why do women suck so much at parallel parking? I was doing some laundry last night, and I as I waited for the elevator, I noticed some girls across the street trying to park a Scion tC. For some reason, I was just completely fascinated by this whole thing. The tC is not as small as the other Scion cars, but it should not be hard to park. Yes, it looked like it was going to be a tight fit, but it was doable, especially with TWO PEOPLE.

That's right, one girl was doing the driving and she had her friend helping her out with her blind spot behind the car. I guess that is not so bad and I shouldn't be making fun of somebody who was a little too shy to love tap the other cars as they tried to back it in. However, I am going to laugh because I assume that the girl tried without her friend's help, and therefore needed to call in reinforcements.

I waited a few more minutes to see what would happen and even briefly contemplated going out to help them, but since I already called the elevator back once and was worried there might not be an available washer, I took my things downstairs. Luckily, the girls proved fairly incompetent and when I got back from putting my clothes in the laundry, the girls were still trying to park. This time, there was another girl playing lookout and a different driver. I was really about to help them, but I had forgot to place something in the washer and needed to hurry back.

When I finally had everything in the washer, I came up to see the girls had finally parked, but only after somebody had vacated a slightly larger spot a little further down the street. But for some reason, all of the girls (a third one must have been tucked in the backseat) were coming back to their car. Not enough time had passed for any of them to have even made it to the clubs nearby and I could only assume that they saw the permit parking signs and realized that they would have to leave, their nearly fifteen minute parking ordeal all for nothing.

I almost wish that they hadn't noticed, because seeing their car towed away would have made my night. Instead, I got a laugh when I went to put my things in the dryer about 30 minutes later and noticed somebody had managed to fit a Jetta, which is a little longer than the tC into the small spot the girls had given up on just a little earlier. Yes,I don't know how long it took them, and yes, it could have been a girl who placed her Jetta into that tight space with such aplomb, but we all know that is not the case.

I love Robert Rodriguez and his films (insert Spy Kids joke here) and I am a big fan of Quentin Tarantino. Throw a little Rosario Dawson in the mix, and you know that I was going to go see Roadhouse. Planet Terror is a good movie, but you really have to have an appreciation for old-school horror to see why what Robert Rodriguez is doing is so much fun. Deathproof takes things to another level. It's a movie that is more viscerally accessible and will go down as a classic. Both are very enjoyable and highly recommended.

The highlight of the night, however, was catching a glimpse of Tarantino himself. went to lineup at Grauman's Chinese for the 12:20 AM, just as the earlier show was letting out. A few minutes before we were to go into the theater, I hear a cheer and people in the line start clapping. Quentin Tarantino is shaking hands with the people waiting in line and people are loving every minute of it. He could have taken the side exit, but he knows the people who are about to sit through three hours of a movie that starts at almost 12:30 are the ones who make him money, so he went out the front.

Earlier in the evening, as I was walking towards the Chinese Theater, I saw hottie tennis star Maria Sharapova running away from photographers but not really. I think she was just happy to get noticed, which might change if she looks at the pictures of her tomorrow on Wire Image and the captions say "Anna Kournikova".

At my current job, I don't have a very long commute. From my front door to my desk, it usually takes about 15-20 minutes. I'm lucky because the longest commute I've had in Los Angeles was about 45 minutes when I had a brief gig at USC (I would love to go back, perhaps for business school). My longest commute was when I was interning in San Francisco while living in Cupertino. If I woke up early enough, I made the trip up 280 in 45 minutes and it was a great drive. If I slept in a little, it could take 90 minutes.

Why do I wax poetic about my commutes? Today something happened as I was moving along that reminded me why commuting is fun, and no, I am not talking about the joy of depressing the clutch 500 times in the space of a couple of miles. It's always fun looking at what the other commuters are doing. Some people like to bebop to their music, and it's always annoying to watch people as they apply makeup or shave, mainly because you hope that something horrible happens to them and it never does.

Today I saw one of those great things you never want to see, but always have to tell everybody about when you do see it: somebody picking their nose in traffic. The particular offender in question this morning was driving an Audi A4. I never get why people think they can just dig for gold in a public place and nobody will notice them, but I guess your car gives you some sense of seclusion. Did this guy have the audacity to eat the booger he was trying so hard for? I'm not sure as traffic started moving before I got to see him finish his little snack. I did see that he had some Starbucks in case he needed to wash it down.

I love cars. I have always thought it would be great fun to have a project car that I worked on and tinkered with. I'm not talking putting big rims on your civic and calling yourself a baller (or Paul Walker). My thoughts go more along the lines of classic restorations and such. Unfortunately, my knowledge of automobiles doesn't go much farther than a jump-start and I have never even changed my own oil. It doesn't really matter because I don't own a house, and therefore don't have a garage where I can work on my project cars. Therefore, it also doesn't bother me that I don't have the money or time to take up this hobby anyway.

For the near future, my auto fetish will continue to be salved by four wheel drifts in Gran Tourismo and perhaps new rims on my Acura at some point. That doesn't mean a guy can't dream, and therefore I submit my first choice for a project car: the Shelby Cobra 427. I don't know why I like this car so much. It's simple. It turns heads. It goes fast. The engine sounds so good you don't even need a radio. There is enough room for you plus whatever girl you are trying to impress.

What else do you really need?

If you answered "Yes" to the title of this post, you should be shot.

I can't stand the Florida Gators. I mean, I REALLY can't stand the Florida Gators. All of that hatred can probably channeled for my great detest of Joakim Noah, the nappy-haired big man for Florida who comes up with a new gesticulation for everything he does on the court, no matter how minor. I feel kind of bad for him. As the son of a French tennis player and Swedish model, he has probably had to fight his whole life for respect on and off the court. Well, he has two championships now, so people will have to give him respect. He can start by cutting some of his hair and working on his jump shot. As for respect off the court, he's sure to make millions in the NBA. In other words, time to leave us, the fans, out of it!!

Now that I have that off my chest, I really do think that Florida deserves special mention. It is not only difficult to repeat as NCAA Tournament champions, but with their football team's win in the 2007 BCS National Championship game means that they hold the most sought-after trophies in the two premier NCAA sports. Their legacy will go down as one of the greatest teams ever, especially since their talented core decided to stay in school another year, even with the NBA calling every step of the way. I think it was the best college basketball season in a long time, although the championship game did not get the blood flowing unless your favorite NBA team has a chance at the first pick in the lottery. Greg Oden finally showed that he has franchise center potential. It would have been nice to see what he could have done with a fully healed hand, but I think he'll be an All Star at the next level.

Finally, I would like to mention that I won every NCAA pool that I was in. Of course, I only entered one, but that doesn't make the victory any less sweet. And now I have baseball to hold me off until football starts again in the fall.

I must be really lazy, because I didn't even attempt to pull off an April Fool's joke this year. I can always count on my family members back east to fall for anything. I once told my Mom I was engaged,and after she stopped telling me how happy she was, I told her it was just a joke for April 1st. In retrospect, that is kind of a cruel thing to do to your mother. On the other hand, it would probably work every year.