| Indy is not a sport, either Fat guy bitching that a girl doesn't weigh as much as him. First, I'm pretty sure this is more proof that racing is not a sport. But second, if what he's saying is true, then all that means is that teams should start using jockeys instead of big moustachiod drivers. But that would take away the one advantage NASCAR/Indy/Drag racing has over real sports: that it presents the image to mostly uneducated southern white men that they could, in theory, participate in the sport. Football doesn't really have that - no normal person looks at a 300 pound linebacker who's 6'7" and thinks "Hey, what does he have that I don't?" But you can look at Jeff Gordon or Dale Earnhardt (before he turned into a cinder) and see that they were drunken hicks - just like you! cranked out at 9:37 PM | |
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Atkins RULES Tonight, while watching the Suns/Spurs game, my friends and I had a dream. A dream of nachos. But not just any nachos - the greatest nachos ever made by man. After viewing our masterpiece, I felt the need to share it with the world. So follow these directions: Ingredients: 1 pound Andalucia sausage 1 pound thick-sliced bacon 1/2 pound steak 1 jar jalapeno peppers 1 pound cheddar cheese 1/2 pound Monterey Jack cheese 1 white onion 1 bag low carb tortilla chips 1 jar salsa 1) Fry the bacon in a pan, and after crispy, cook sausage in the grease left over in pan from bacon. Slice sausage and bacon into small pieces. 2) Grill steak. We used a Foreman grill, though concurrances all around suggested that grilling in another medium would have yielded superior taste. Cut into small pieces. 3) Dice onion. 4) Grate cheese (all of it). Mix the cheddar and jack cheese in a bowl. 5) In a large pan (preferably one that you would use for broiling a turkey), line with tin foil, and lay down a bed of chips. Cover chips with roughly 1/6 of cheese. Cover cheese with 1/3 of each of jalapenos, sausage, bacon, steak and onions. Cover this with 1/6 of cheese. 6) Repeat step 5 two more times. 7) Put in preheated oven at 375 degrees for about 10-12 minutes, or until the concoction is melted. 8) Place salsa in bowl, and enjoy! Goes particularly well with beer and, as we later discovered, ice cream (vanilla.) Approximate number of calories: 7723/serving. Grams of carbohydrates per serving: Roughly 30g (this jumps considerably if using regular tortilla chips.) To recap: These nachos cost about $18 to make. But as you eat and feel like you're going to explode, you can always say to yourself: I am on a diet. The Atkins diet. So it must be good for me. And that, my friends, is priceless.  Before  After cranked out at 3:03 AM | |
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Which makes sense, considering I am on the lower end of the Kinsey scale... cranked out at 1:10 PM | |
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Question... I don't mean to be offensive. But if you had a showdown between a famous chef, and a rich fat guy, who do you think would know more about food? cranked out at 8:01 PM | |
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Umm... Just one of those things... I was watching a gameshow, where the question was asked, "Who was the first African-American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States?" A few things: 1) People should know this because it's was a moment of historical watershed in the history of race in America. 2) People should know this because it was somewhat recent. 3) There is one person who it is definitely NOT. If he had guessed Thomas, okay. In fact, if he had guessed anyone other than the one he did (or possibly Brandeis or Jay or something), it would have been better. But he guessed Rehnquist. I mean, seriously. Has there been a whiter white man in the history of whiteness? Even Stevens gets the occaisional bout of jungle fever. ("I'll know it when I see it" indeed. cranked out at 7:55 PM | |
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To Sith or Not to Sith? I watched Star Wars 3 last night, at a midnight showing. This in and of itself is not entirely dorky, until you consider as well that I did so with a plastic lightsaber. Were there duels? You better believe there was some duelin' transpirin'. In the mean time, there is a preview before the movie for Chronicles of Narnia, proving once again that Hollywood actually wants to destroy my childhood. It would be more efficient if they just went back in time and punched me in the stomach. On the movie: it was decent. But you better believe it's going to be hailed as genius. As with Return of the King, the fact that it has characters we all know and love makes it instantly a classic in the minds of many. And it's going to gross a trillion dollars. Literally a trillion dollars. And I'm further convinced that George Lucas is actually going to turn the moon into a Deathstar. The one thing that continually strikes me about Star Wars as a pair of trilogies, however, is this: the Sith are supposed to be a huge, evil organization that needs to be erradicated becuase it is so inherantly bad. But it doesn't really strike me as that evil. Let's go over a complete list of really bad things the "Dark Side" does in the course of the movies. 1) They manipulate the empire into war. Okay, so they start a war to gain power. But that's not evil, per se. Especially in light of the fact that they convince other people to do it. They then kill those other people, in the end. So really it's just a matter of finding inherantly subversive individuals, goading them into showing themselves, and then destroying them. It's just like a sting, only on a galaxy-wide scale. Even if this is a little deceptive, the ends justify the means and to be perfectly fair, they unite the universe and create peace. 2) They occaisionally administer disproportionate punishment Vader choking the admiral to death, for example. But in the vast majority of cases, this is only done as a method of court marshall. Leia is imprisoned for treason. So their justice system is evidently not completely out of whack. And sure, they blew up a planet, but it was a planet that was harboring... terrorists. Sometimes you just can't put up with that. And that's it. They aren't terrribly "evil" in the sense that their actions are incontrovertably bad. In fact, if you recharacterize the force sides as the "light" side of the force, dealing with humanity and human emotion, and the "dark" side of the force that preaches detachment and a lack of empathy... well, it doesn't look so absurd to say that the 'light' side is bad. The "good" Jedi, after all, steal babies from their homes to train whereas the "bad" Jedi rely on consent. The government the Sith set up is one of basic planetary rights. They don't have an overly restrictive Imperial presence. They use clones as their soldiers, meaning they don't require the sacrifice of people with families - also meaning no draft. In fact, when you look at the Empire in 4, 5, and 6 - they don't ever get around to doing anything particularly intrusive to anyone, even in the face of a rebellion. The Wookies can live like Wookies, and the Gungans can live suspiciously like Carribean Rastafarians. The only indication of civil interferrence we ever actually get is Lando talking about mining permits and so on. But the basic regulation of mining is important inasmuch as he is involved in basic commodity trade. It's possible the Empire just has antitrust laws. The thing that makes the movie so effective, I think, is that the Sith government is so effectively portrayed as "evil" while simultaniously never earning the moniker. If they didn't wear black and talk about the "dark" side of things so often, there's nothing keeping them from being the good guys. Technically, the Emperor is a result of free political will - and Luke is thwarting the electorate by attempting to attack him. How is Palpatine different in form from Lincoln? Skywalker is the John Wilkes Booth of a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Is killing so bad? The Jedi seem to do it often enough. The Republic seems to do it quite a bit. So where's the badness? cranked out at 12:02 PM | |
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Stats I'm Sick Of I've now heard the stat "Of teams tied 2-2 after four games, the team who wins the fifth game in a best of seven series in the NBA will win the series 80% of the time." Okay, first, a team who is up three games to two, if both teams are completely even, should win 75%. So let's see if the extra 5% can be made up for in the fact that the fifth game's home team is the team with home court advantage in the series, which usually means they're better to begin with. Or just the psychological advantage of pressuring the other team with elimination. cranked out at 6:52 PM | |
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Womenfolk and their sewing notions Group says we need more chicks doing engineering and science. But... but... Larry Summers says that it might just be biological differences, not opportunity or social pressure. cranked out at 11:59 AM | |
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Commercials I realize this is a small problem, and not likely one that will get a lot of fervor, but could the people who write commercials please know English? I understand that outsourcing is the new 'merger,' and that there's a need to give jobs to illiterate six year olds in Tangier, but when the literal meaning of a commercial is insulting to your product, don't do it. For example, there's a Universal Studios commercial that shows people at the park, and then has text that reads, "Workaholic? Time to fall off the wagon." Now, if you're an alcoholic, and you fall off the wagon, it means you drink. So presumably, the commercial says that you need to get the fuck back to your office. There's also a Degree commercial saying that it's the deoderant for people who "take risks." Now... this would seem to suggest that... wearing the deoderant... is a risk. Seriously. I get what they MEAN, but I shouldn't have to interpret shit. cranked out at 4:02 PM | |
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Hitchhiker's guide to ruining my goddamn childhood There are a lot of aspiring screenwriters. I mean seriously: There are warehouses upon warehouses in Hollywood that are filled with scripts that were never bought. And on top of those, there are probably twice as many that were never even submitted. Even still, there are those that weren't finished or those that were considered at a late night dinner party, and never put to paper. I mention this because I feel like it's proof that the major film studios are actually spying on me, taking things I had fond memories of, and then paying Cuban immigrents to urinate on them in the form of poorly made movies. It can't be that there are no new ideas, or that novel takes on extant themes are impossible. I saw Melinda and Melinda yesterday, and that was decent. There isn't a lack of hack writers to churn out crap. They all got fired when TV executives realized that people really just want mirrors with ads, and turned everything to a 'reality' show. The worst thing to happen to movies, apart from Junior, was the unfortunate confluence of illiteracy and nostalgia that began to fuel the entertainment market. It was figured out that you can poorly remake a movie that nobody has seen but which is considered to be good, and that movie will gross millions as the Emperors New Clothes complex takes over. The other thing people have done (and I blame George Lucas for almost all of this) is to make movies out of the books that kids grew up on. Hey, guess what!? Lord of the Rings sort of sucked. The acting was mostly bad, certain subplots were alluded to but not made explicit because the movie was already so long, and when it comes down to it, the story really just isn't that compelling. Getting the kid from North to play a major role? That was just a low blow. Seriously. Go and get the Return of the King DVD and watch the scene with Frodo waking up in bed in the Elven villiage. And put it on repeat. Watch it five or six times. Then call the movie a masterpiece. I fucking dare you. There's more homoeroticism and pedophilic undertones in that one scene than all of Gilligans' Guy Land IV: The Skipper's Revenge. The truth is, people were willing to accept anything titled "Lord of the Rings" as the genius epic of our time because they remember it so fondly. If Peter Jackson had just repackaged Event Horizon and renamed Sam Neill's character to "Frodo," nobody would have blinked an eye. Even if these were GOOD movies, it would still be stupid. Because for one, they'll never be as good as the books. And for another, they prevent younger people from reading by letting them pay $17 or whatever tickets are nowadays to go sit in the dark and watch some graphics art major from ITT Tech's senior project. Which brings me to Hitchhiker. First, the good. The casting was very good. Suprisingly so. It's possible everyone in the movie is a huge name in Britan or whatever, but many of them were not people who would have probably been chosen had casting been done American Idol style on the Hitchhiker Usenet group. Which is a compliment. And yes, I reaize this means I'm giving Mos Def "big ups" as the black people say. Then there's the bad. Here's a note for Hollywood in the future: if a book is driven mostly by its imagery and plot and characters, it's likely a good bet for a movie. If, however, a book is largely clever writing, it's not going to translate. The only parts of Guide where I found myself really enjoying the movie were the ones where they just narrated straight from the book. Those parts are funny. Very, very few scenes were actually added to by having the visual representation present. That's not good in a visual medium. So screw you Hollywood. Maybe in the future, rather than making more movies out of childhood memories, maybe youc an... you know... think of something original? cranked out at 5:38 PM | |
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