Halloween v. Halloween

Last night Diesel, Johnathan Orion, and I settled ourselves into a freezing unfinished basement with a DVD player and a projector. Our sole purpose was to compare and contrast the original John Carpenter's Halloween to the more recent Rob Zombie Halloween. Out of respect we watched John Carpenter's first. I had never seen the original Halloween, having only recently had my eyes opened to the beauty that is the horror genre. The thing that surprised me about this flick was how slow building it was. At the beginning the nurse gets kinda fucked up a little, but not killed. After that it's a slow burn until Michael starts doing his grizzly business. And you know what?, I kinda liked that, while not as visceral an experience as most modern horror flicks the slow progression of events and the "cat and mouse" game was just creepy enough to let the situation sink in to the viewers mind. The open ending which has become clichè in this genre was shockingly original at the time the movie was made. Jamie Lee Curtis was the only character that I didn't hate immediately. Her two friends and their boyfriends were the reason God created serial killers.

Rob Zombie's Halloween was the next to be projected across the wall of Johnathan Orion's basement. It started with... wait let me explain something first, I swear. I swear a lot. I don't mind swearing in movies, songs, radio programs, churches, children's programming or any other venue. That being said, they cussed too much in this damn movie. Every other word was on George Carlin's list. The swearing was so over the top that it kind of became the star of the movie for the first several minutes. Michael's step-father vomits profanity toward him and his mother, and talks about how hot his step-daughter's ass is. But after a while the language toned down. One of the first big differences that I noticed between this film and the original was that the Laurie character (played by Jamie Lee Curtis in the original) was now as annoying and slaughter worthy as the rest of the characters. Oh and Michael was fucking HUGE in this one.. like 8 feet tall. This flick focused more on what made Michael the way he was, instead of the things he did. It ends at the same point that the original movie did, but it starts much earlier in Michael's life. It cites that his abusive home life and violent predisposition turned the sweet little boy into a monster. This wasn't touched on in the original Halloween at all, and I liked it better that way. I'm a weirdo, but I always find myself cheering for the killer in these movies anyway, so why are you trying to make me feel sorry for him? I inferred from the fact that he wears a Halloween mask and carries a big fucking knife which he habitually uses on copulating teenagers that he probably wasn't the most well adjusted of human beings, you don't need to drive the point home by showing me every gnarled branch on his dysfunctional family tree. This flick was much more violent and "in your face" with the gore than the original, which made it more fun to watch. and there were a few twists made on the original that were nice to see. For example, when the dork that just finished banging Laurie's slutty friend #2 comes back into the bedroom wearing a sheet with his glasses on over it, it shows Michael killing him and donning the sheet before killing her. Overall this movie was okay, but it suffered from too many endings. And there was a pretty week tie-in between Laurie crying at the end of the movie and her crying in her crib as a baby.

Overall, you have to respect the original Halloween, it was a well done psychological horror movie. The remake was adequate as a horror movie, but can't really stand up to it's predecessor.

Presidents Day

Presidents Day
George Washington sacrificed his birthday so that we might have a long weekend; however, my company doesn't celebrate President's day. And in lieu of current events (well 8 years ain't so current) I think I'm beginning to understand why. What ever happened to our "Hero" presidents? When was the last time we had a Commander-in-Chief that inspired us as a nation? Washington was known for his honesty. Lincoln was known for pulling himself up by the bootstraps. Reagan was known for his fuzzy economics. Clinton was known for his cum stain, and "Dubya" is going to go down in history as a war/hate/fearmonger.

Maybe it's time to reconsider this particular holiday altogether.

Ok, I'm off my soapbox now..
Happy presidents day

My Ex - Xbox, Robo Vampire

My Ex-Xbox

I sold my Xbox today, Johnathan Orion wants one to mod and I haven't touched mine in over a year. He's giving me a wireless access point in exchange so I'm pretty stoked. Next step: get my DVRed movies to transfer to my server machine.

Robo Vampire

Beer and Bad Movie night rendered a gem(truly outrageous!) of celluloid perfection this weekend.
Robo Vampire
Overview
Director: Joe Livingstone
Writer: William Palmer (writer)
Release Date: 1988 (USA) more
Plot Summary: Narcotics agent Tom Wilde is given a second chance at life after being shot and killed. In a futuristic experiment, agent Wilde is returned to life as an Android Robot. He is sent on a very dangerous mission into the depths of the golder Triangle to rescue Sophie, a beautiful undercover agent who has been captured by the evil drug warlord Mr. Young and his inhuman creation the Vampire Beast.

Now I feel as though I should warn you these are not American Vampires.. they are Chinese Vampires, which apparently are Rabbit-Monkeys with Bottle Rockets.
Chinese Vampires hop everywhere they go and they look like monkeys in robes. Their big "power" is to fire bottle rockets out of their robes. If you stick a piece of paper on their head they will fall asleep. Also, they can sometimes be avenged by the ghost of their American lover who can be killed by writing on her tits.
I'm not kidding...

This movie didn't even have any closing credits.. it was that bad.. it just suddenly said "THE END" and went back to the DVD menu.

Diesel,Rock,God.

My friend Diesel is in a Christian band. To hear a little of his band click here

This video was shot using a camcorder, so the quality is actually pretty good given the circumstances.

Sick and Tired - My Dinner With Lunchbox

Sick and Tired

I called in sick to work today. Last night Lunchbox and I went to an Italian place for dinner and I've been sick ever since. I don't think there was anything wrong with the food since Lunchbox didn't get sick, but the combination of rich food and sinus drainage have turned my stomach into a wasteland.

My Dinner With Lunchbox

However there is a mildly funny annecdote that goes along with the aforementioned dinner with Lunchbox. We are both currently single and 99% of our friends are married couples, so we find ourselves eating dinner together fairly often just because we don't want to eat alone. Last night we decided to go to the Italian place because I was craving some spaghetti and meatballs. Lunchbox was apprehensive because the place is pretty expensive so I offered to pay for the meal, no big deal, any time one of us is broke the other will pick up the tab. As I mentioned before, both of us are single, so it never occurred to us that yesterday was Valentine's Day. We got to the resturant and I ordered my food, the lady at the counter said "Will there be anything else" and I indicated to Lunchbox and said "Whatever he wants, as well". The lady gave us a big smile and started giggling but I just assumed that she was trying to be friendly, or was retarded.
When the waitress brought the bread out to our table she was wearing a bright pink shirt with a big heart on it and a shit-eating grin. "Happy Valentine's Day" she said giving Lunchbox and I a knowing look. Lunchbox didn't understand what she had said so he said "What??" and she repeated "Happy Valentine's Day" to which he replied, "Oh yeah, whatever, thanks". At this point the waitress looked at me with a look of sympathy.

Thats was when it hit us... these people think we're on a gay date.

Furthermore, they think I'm dating some asshole who forgot it was Valentine's Day.
They were probably talking to each other in the kitchen saying "That guy in the sweater needs to dump his asshole boyfriend".

So I did what any guy would do... I stood up, threw my water in his face and screamed "MAYBE NEXT YEAR YOU'LL REMEMBER!!!" and stormed out of the resturant.


P.S. That last part is a lie, we just sat there and laughed about it.. but it would have been funnier if it had ended like that :)

Swami Beyondananda’s 2008 State of the Universe Address

Swami Predicts Heart Times Ahead

Every year at this time, I am asked to make predictions, and each time I politely refuse because I don’t want to jeopardize my nonprophet status. But this year is different. With 2012 just one quantum leap year away, we humans might finally be ready for a quantum leap of our own. The message is coming in loud and clear. Time to shift or get off the pot.

In order to upshift our karma into surpassing gear, however, we must shift our awareness downward from the static of the head to the ecstatic of the heart. If we are to have an awakening instead of a wake, I predict heart times ahead.

Disheartenment in the Heartland

Heartenment, after all, is just the thing to counteract the disheartenment in the heartland. Take the economy -- please! After years of untreated Deficit Inattention Disorder, the U.S. dollar is now worth less than a dollar of Monopoly money. As the most recent Greenspan report tells us, the average American family barely has enough green to span the average month. Meanwhile, trickle down economics has proved true to its name, leaving a growing class of pee-ons at the bottom.

Then there’s electile dysfunction. Instead of transparency around how votes are cast and counted, we have an apparent trance. The secret ballot has been taken to the next level, and now voting machines with secret software count the votes in secret. This is called “faith-based” vote counting. Hey, some of those new “smart” voting machines are so smart, that they don’t even need voters! This makes perfect sense because government of, by and for the people has now been efficiently transformed to government of, by and for the very, very few people. Talk about minority representation. We are now governed by a smaller minority than ever in our history!

Even when we do manage to get an election, the body politic still suffers from impotence. As we learned after the 2006 election, just because we vote for someone doesn’t mean they are going to vote for us. Instead of canceling the Iraqi Horror Picture Show, the Democratic misleadership has gone along with the same basic neocon con, only with a cosmetic makeover – sort of a wolfawitz in sheepawitz’s clothing.

Though the upwising continues, irony deficiency and truth decay still plague the body politic. Instead of forums that shine light on political issues, the media has encouraged againstums where incendiary phrases spark heated arguments. So, while red tribe Republicans and blue tribe Democrats argue whether it’s wronger to kill the born or the unborn, the born keep dying while the not-yet-born are stuck with the bill. No wonder our moral compass has gone south.

As if global warring isn’t enough to worry about, now there’s global warming. It would be sad indeed to have come this far, only to see the headline: “Human Race Ends In a Dead Heat.”

No wonder so many people are scared shiftless. The good news is, this is the State of the Universe Address and I am happy to report that the state of the Universe is copasetic – ever changing, same as always. This is particularly heartening when we realize that that universal state is also our own.

Universe Knows Best

When it comes to universal wisdom, you can’t beat the Universe. First of all, the Universe is everywhere all at once. Talk about being on top of things. Even as it keeps expanding, the Universe has it together -- which means, as part of the universe, a part of us has it all together too. We are inextricably connected to the Universe. It is inescapable. Without the Universe, we’d be nowhere.

Here is more amazing news. We are all descended from the same Big Bang! When the Big Bang went boom, all of the Universe’s parts departed from one particle. And that includes us. So, we might as well proclaim it proudly. “The Big Bang is my pop. Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!”

The Big Bang is everybody’s pop, which means we are all related. If we are indeed a fractal chip off the old block, Universe-wise ... then somewhere we must be as wise as the Universe. For millennia, spiritual teachers have told us to look inside for this universal wisdom. It turns out, they were right. The real spiritual pilgrimage is actually a journey of about twenty-four inches, roughly the distance from the head to the heart.

The Heart of the Matter is the Matter of the Heart

Yes, everyone is equipped to attune to universal wisdom because everyone has been given a heart. And yet, the heart seems to be the last gift we open. The most underdeveloped resource on the planet is the treasure inside our own treasured chest! Given all the craziness in the world, maybe if we invested in expanding our hearts, we’d have less need to shrink our heads.

And less of a need to be so all-consumed by consumerism. We have learned to spend so much energy pursuing happiness that we never stop to think what would happen if we actually caught it -- or rather, if it caught us. With all this hot pursuit, we have left real happiness in the dust. It is sad indeed that we end up jealous that someone else’s happiness might be bigger than our own. Freud called this “happiness envy.”

As the saying goes, money can’t buy happiness, although it can buy anti-depressants. But if you are seeking more out of life than not being depressed, the key to happiness is to grow your own. Every one of us should be asking, “What good am I?” What good can I add to the greater goodness? Maybe if we had greater goodness, we’d need fewer goods. As human beings, our biggest asset is love, so now is the time to get up off our big fat assets, and practice supply-side spirituality. Because we aren’t here to earn God’s love, we are here to spend it. We are here to re-grow the Garden from the grassroots up, and have a heaven of a time doing it!

Heartland Security

Now while the solution is simple, no one said it was going to be easy. Just as the human potential movement has made great gains over the past 25 years, the inhuman potential movement has more than kept up. Everywhere I go, the little David’s I meet all ask the same question: How can we get Goliath to go lieth down? I have good news and I have other news, and they are both the same: It’s up to us. We must lead ourselves out of the bewilderness. Yes, we’ve been politically abused, so the first step is to disabuse ourselves. We must start overseeing instead of overlooking.

By overlooking what we should have been overseeing, we have become enablers for the lowest common dominator. Whether it’s called globalization or gobble-ization, it’s the same old mining operation -- that’s mine, that’s mine, that’s mine. Because we’ve allowed ourselves to imagine that someday that “mine” will be ours, we have agreed to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with our government. We promise not to ask them what they are doing, and they promise not to tell us. That way, we can pretend to believe we are invading a country to keep the peace, when we are really there to keep the pieces.

Meanwhile, back at home, they’ve given last rites to the Bill of Rights, and newspeak has become the new spoken language of the mainstream media. Now before we just shrug and say, “Orwell, what can we do about it?” we need to see the only way to overgrow Big Brother is with bigger brotherhood -- and even bigger sisterhood. Time to heal our spiritual dyslexia, and realize our natural state is sacred, not scared. The scared masculine and the scared feminine have given us the dysfunctional dance of abusers and enablers. Now we must empower the sacred masculine and sacred feminine to come together and conceive what has been inconceivable – the truly evolved human.

We need to amplify the love and light to counterbalance the darkness and fear, and that is why we need a nongovernmental Department of Heartland Security to secure the heartland and let the powers in power know in no uncertain terms, “Bigger brotherhood is watching you.”

To do that, we must migrate en masse --regardless of political or spiritual affiliation -- to the land of the heart. Instead of squabbling over the differences that separate us, we must cohere around the heart-core values we share in common. That is the only way we can trade our insecurity for inner security. No matter where we stand on climate change, one thing is clear. Global heartwarming is bound to change the political climate for the better.

Whatever the problems, we have the wherewithal to address them. Now all we need is the aware-with-all. Whether you call yourself a creationist or an evolutionist, or take the simplest approach of all to the Great Unknown -- not knowing -- one thing is undeniable: We are all one with the same One. The story of separation, survival of the fittest, and lowest common dominator --that is the old story.

Only we have the power to close the book on the old story once and for all, by declaring: And they all lived happily ever after.

And happily ever after begins now.

Valentine the Destroyer

It's Valentine's day once again. The day which we celebrate the St. Valentine's Day massacre each year.
If you don't know the ledgend it goes something like this:

On the morning of Thursday, February 14, 1929 St. Valentine's Day, five members of George 'Bugs' Moran's gang, a gang "follower", and a mechanic who happened to be at the scene were lined up against the rear inside wall of the garage of the SMC Cartage Company in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago's North Side. They were then shot and killed by four members of Al Capone's gang (two of them dressed as police officers). When one of the dying men, Frank Gusenberg, was asked who shot him, he replied, "I'm not gonna talk - nobody shot me." Capone himself had arranged to be on vacation in Florida at the time.

The St. Valentine's Massacre resulted from a plan devised by Al Capone and various members of his gang, for Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn, Fred “Killer” Burke and Fred Goetz, to eliminate Bugs Moran, the boss of the North Side Gang and Capone's main rival. The massacre was planned by the Capone mob for a number of reasons; in retaliation for an unsuccessful attempt by Frank and his brother Peter Gusenberg to murder Jack McGurn earlier in the year; the North Side Gang's complicity in the murder of Pasqualino "Patsy" Lolordo as well as Antonio "The Scourge" Lombardo, and Bugs Moran muscling in on a Capone-run dog track in the Chicago suburbs. Also, the rivalry between Moran and Capone for control of the lucrative Chicago bootlegging business led Capone to accept McGurn's plan (McGurn was the primary architect of the plot).


And that's why we give heart shaped candies to the people we love on this special day, to signify that at any moment we could be gunned down like dogs in an abandoned warehouse.

It's a beautiful sentiment, don't you think.

"It's a lonely, lonely feeling when your Valentine is wrong" - Old 97s

iSpend - WWJD?

Little known fact about me is that all day I think about songs.
Completely random songs fall out of the ether and into my head for no reason.
For instance, I've been humming the theme to "Duck Tales" most of the morning, then I started singing "Morning Train" for a while, then I started with "If I only had a brain", followed by Indigo Girls - "Ghost". This has never been a big problem for me before, I always just accepted it as a minor quirk. iTunes has changed everything. Now when an obscure song meanders its way through my synapses I can own said song in a matter of clicks. This means that my iSpending has gone through the roof. To make matters worse, I invariably find more songs I want to hear once I go to the iTunes store to find the original song. Filling up my iPod is almost as expensive as filling up my gas tank. Sure, I could probably steal the music offline, but when I'm faced with a moral dilemma I ask myself "What would Jesus do?" then I do the opposite. I'm not being sacreligious, I know a Mexican named Jesus and he's not exactly an upstanding individual when it comes to copyright infringement.
I'm all for convenience, hell I love it, but I wish that convenience wasn't so costly. Oh well, I'm off to purchase the theme from "Greatest American Hero".

I'll write more crap when I think of it.

Why are people fascinated by my balls?

I have a pair of those Chinese stress balls sitting on my desk. I've had them for years but just found them the other day and put them beside my wire-frame office depot pen holder just to the left of my desk clock that hasn't had batteries in it for over 3 years and underneath my "Nukes, because sometimes you're tired of talking" poster. Since the moment I put them on my desk everyone that has entered my cube has commented on, or played with my balls. I'm not complaining, but it's just odd that something as unimpressive as 2 ball bearings with little bells inside would have such universal appeal.

Twisters a comin'!!

They evacuated everybody in my office to one of the conference rooms today because of tornadoes in the area. Nothing eventful happened, but now I can't get that song from the Wizard of Oz out of my head.

Stupid crap I did today.

I started a blog today. Diesel made one so I figured what the hell I've got as much worthless shit to talk about as he does.
Me and Lunchbox ate at a sandwich place for lunch, I won't say which one, but it rhymes with "Smizno's". The food kinda sucked, but they were training new people who had clearly never seen bread, knives, or sandwich ingredients before, so what can you expect? I've gotten so used to disappointment when it comes to the fast food industry that when I receive adequate service I think I'm being treated like a king.
Last night aDaM and his wife and I went out to eat and the waitress came by the table a whopping 1 time to refill our glasses and only got 1 of the three orders wrong and I left a huge tip because "The service was so much better than I expected." Somehow in this society "A job well done" has become "A job, well, done".

I watched Diesel play his new PS3 this weekend, it was pretty cool. He bought a game named "Uncharted" or something like that. It was about Sir Francis Drake and the city of El Dorado. The graphics were really good and the storyline was engaging.

The Girl Scout cookies I ordered last month finally arrived today. Damn, them girls can bake! I got Samoas and Tagalongs. I'm halfway through a box of Tagalongs as I'm writing this and I have no intentions of slowing down till it's gone.

I'll post more crap when I think of it.

These are the people in my neighborhood, the people that I meet each day.

To protect the guilty I've decided to refer to some people using aliases. So that you will understand my relationship to these aliases I've created this list.

"Lunchbox" also known as "Snacks" - A friend that works at the same company as me.
"Diesel" - One of my closest friends that I've known since college.
"Lemony" - My friend since early childhood, she recently got married and got this nickname because she married a British guy.
"Limey" - British guy that Married Lemony. We've since become friends.
"Sprite" - Lemony and Limey as a couple. ie. "Me and Diesel and Sprite went to Best Buy"
"Miley" - a nickname my friends gave me that I now use when referring to myself in 3rd person.
"aDaM" - My Friend since high school. We've also lived together for about a decade off and on.
"Johnathan Orion" - A friend that I work with. I introduced him to his wife "HennyBigUns"
"Tome" - A friend that recently moved to Memphis.
"TooHotForTome" - Tome's Wife. My avid runner, hot chick friend.

I'll add others to this list as I think of them...

I'm weird so if you like this blog you're probably weird too.

Hello folks,
I'm gonna use this blog to tell you billions of readers about the most pointless and unimportant aspects of my daily life. You will be regaled with my insignificant opinions, barraged with my daily tidal waves of bad ideas, and overloaded with daily trials and sufferings, victories and defeats that have nothing to do with your life.. in short.. this is reality TV for pseudo-literary types. I would be remiss if i didn't offer you this piece of advice, if you want to read something interesting and worthwhile go buy a book. This blog is going to be pointless drivel vomited forth by a barely sane, pathetic excuse for a human being, like reading Brittany Spear's diary( but the spelling may be worse).