Last week was the annual beach trip with my family, and it was lots of fun as usual, except that we had huge jerks for neighbors.  This guy took down our volleyball net and threw it into the dunes about fifty feet down the beach.  I guess that story was more interesting if you were there than if you read it here.

We saw War Of The Worlds last week.  I have conflicting opinions about this movie.  My initial reaction was that I liked the movie and all the awesome special effects, but the ending was stupid.  Then I read an article that said that the ending was true to the book and “purposefully low-key.”  So maybe I can respect Spielberg’s decision to go with the stupid ending, which I hope wasn’t so stupid and anticlimactic in Wells’s book.  Regardless, I believe it would have been better if someone other than Tom Cruise had been chosen to play the main role.  He has that stupid grin on his face all the time.  It annoys me.  Not that I think he’s bad at everything he’s been in.  I just don’t like him so much in movies that aren’t supposed to be funny.

Today we declare our Independence Day!

Quick thought - I saw lots of fireworks tonight while driving back from my parents’ house.  Which made me think, it’s probably really cool to be in an airplane over a fairly populated area from about 9:30 to 12:30 on a clear July 4^th night.

I’ve recently purchased my own car insurance for the first time in my life.  Before now I was always just on my parents’ policy.  Now that I’m supposedly an adult (so they say), I shopped around for policies.  I’ve started to understand why Ned Flanders considers insurance a form of gambling.  You can pay this much a year, and if you get in a wreck you get this much.  But pay just a little bit more, and you get way more than that if you get in a wreck.

Here’s the thought process:
What are the odds that I will get in a wreck?  I mean, I pass cars on the road all of the time, most of them are not wrecked.  Well I suppose it could happen.. maybe.  We could fix the car with a five dollar check from Bob’s Brand Insurance, right?  Well maybe not.  Maybe we need more.  Do you think the Camry is worth 75k?  Yeah, lets insure it for that much.  Wait, what about bodily injury insurance.  Nothing in my body will ever cost more than 10k to fix, right?  More?  Maybe we need seven and a half digits on that figure.  How’s that look?  Five thousand dollars a year premium??  Well maybe we don’t need to insure the XBox behind one of the fifteen inch subs.

And so forth and so on.  No matter what happens, the house always wins.

Marge: I’m sure your insurance will cover the house.
Maude: Uh, well, no.  Neddy doesn’t believe in insurance.  He considers it a form of gambling.

  --The Simpsons: “Hurricane Neddy” (Episode 4F07)

Hurricane coverage is kinda funny.  We were watching CNN this morning as Hurricane Dennis was making landfall, and they only had a person on the beach in Florida a couple hundred miles from the eye.  That wasn’t good enough for me, I wanted someone in Alabama or Pensacola.  So naturally I turned to Fox News, as they are more likely to have that kind of death and destruction.

So when they aren’t talking to people on the beach, they cut back to two people in the studio.  This lady gives a weather update like every ten minutes, and as you know a hurricane doesn’t change all that much in ten minutes.  So she’s going over the satellite pictures again, when the anchorman questions her about the wind speeds, very condescendingly.  Now you can tell she’s quite annoyed that he questioned her, so she’s starts raising her voice, and she’s no longer looking at the camera but at the anchorman who is behind the camera and a little to the left.  And she’s spouting off the sources of this information.  It was quite funny.

I guess if everything I said after working for twelve hours straight was broadcast on national tv I’d say some pretty dumb things too.

Fair And Balanced®

Update:  4:15 PM
I just turned the hurricane coverage back on for a few minutes to find a reporter who literally cannot stand up straight because of the wind and rain.  And the camera man pans around to show the area, and you see someone else standing in the background.  The lady in the studio asks “what is that person doing in the parking lot?” and the guy responds “that is another reporter I believe.”  Haha!

Update 2:  11:45 PM
One more to add.  CNN showed this clip about a hundred times tonight (I caught it around 7:00) that I will refer to as “The Sheet Metal Video”.  There are some reporters and camera men, and they are in Pensacola Florida, and big pieces of sheet metal are flying down the road and they are jumping out of the way.  All the while you’re thinking- ‘it would be cool if one of those pieces of sheet metal flew right into that guy’s throat.  It’d cut his head clean off.’  It was crazy.

You can in fact view that video footage right here.  I like how the guy who’s yelling “Get back! Get back!” is the person who is standing the furthest out.  And look for the guy in blue who takes cover behind the camera man who is also wearing blue.  And I like how the two reporters argue about who has been standing in the strongest wind.

I just watched The Village for the first time since I saw it in theaters.  I still thought it was a really good movie.  I wanted to see it again to see if I missed anything obvious in the beginning.  It turns out I didn’t really.  I guess that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

Do your very best not to scream.

I have this writing device at work that I got from the Blue Cross of California representative when he came last year.  One side of it is a pen, the other side is a highlighter.  This is very useful to me when I use one feature at a time.

Sometimes I like to take the caps off both ends at the same time.  Whenever I do, I suddenly get this instinctive feeling of fear deep within my heart, simply from gazing at this fully unsheathed writing/highlighting instrument, reminiscent of Darth Maul’s Light Sabre.  It always bothered me when people had pencils without erasers, that were sharpened at both ends.  Some unwritten law of stuff design should clearly state that a thin, cylindrical object should have, at most, one pointed end.  The other end should be, at least, flat.  Preferably, it should be a bit larger than the rest of the object.  Like a nail, or a fang, or a knife, or a finger.  The sight of an object like said pen/highlighter evokes a feeling of imminent danger, like the it is poised to jump through my ribcage into my heart at a moment’s notice.  I think I’m gonna put the caps back on this thing now...

Go ahead envy me, I’m rap’s MVP

You may or may not have heard of this.  I actually read about it in a magazine.  I think it’s really cool.  Google Globe Trotting.  It’s a bunch of interesting satellite pictures you can see on Google Maps.

On a side note, Google now has road maps for Japan.  And the UK and Ireland.

I just watched The Last Samurai.  I liked it a lot.  It was a little long.  I really liked the first part more than the ‘climax’ part.  Kinda like Pearl Harbor.  I would have liked it better as kind of an interesting documentary.  Well I say that, but if they had made it that way I’d be complaining about how it had no ending.

I find the feudal Japanese/samurai culture very fascinating.  I’m sure the movie isn’t 100% accurate, but still.  The whole thing of not being afraid to die- you don’t really have that in western cultures.  And the notion that suicide can be honorable- that’s a completely different concept (and it’s in a very different mindset from suicide bombing, in case my comments bring that to mind).

Anyway, that’s enough of my ranting about Japanese.  If you want to learn more, just pick up a copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.

When I’m driving to and from work there’s not really much point in putting in a CD, since I’ll be home after about one to two songs.  So I usually listen to the radio.  But even the alt-rock (or emo or whatever the kids are calling it nowadays) station plays primarily the same ten or fifteen songs, with about every fourth or fifth song being something from my era.  But when I’m tired of hearing Velvet Revolver whine about falling to pieces I’ll turn over to “Kiss,” the station that proudly ascribes unto itself the title “number one hit music station”--as if that is a good thing--so that I can get an idea of what ten or fifteen songs the cool kids are listening too.  This is not because I believe that this will somehow make me cool.  Long ago I discarded any desire for “coolness” and accepted--nay, embraced!--my geek status.  No friends, I listen to Kiss so that I have new material to make fun of.  Because I can only make jokes about the lyric “fo shizzle my nizzle” for so long (and I think my time for that ran out about three or four years ago).

While listening to the song “Don’t Cha,” it wasn’t just the dumb lyrics that caught my attention.  What really makes this craptastic song extra funny is the background vocals.  They are just echoes of the dumb lyrics, but in an even more annoying voice.

I present for you Exhibit A: the chorus (with background vocals shown in italics):

      Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?
      Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?   like me
      Don’t cha, don’t cha baby
      Don’t cha
      Don’t cha wish your girlfriend raw like me?   raw
      Don’t cha wish your girlfriend fun like me?   big fun

The funniest part of this is when the background singer says “raawwww.”  Listen for it the next time you are exposed to this musical interpretation of a train wreck!

Now, I present for you Exhibit B:  the funniest lines in this song in my opinion:

      Maybe next lifetime   maybe next lifetime
      Possibly   possibly

The only reason this sentence was split into two lines is because someone couldn’t think of any better lyric.  The awesome hilariousness of this lyric probably doesn’t come through when you read it here.  But trust me.  If you listen for this lyric (it’s near the end), the background vocals in particular sound so terribly forced and out-of-place that it is hilarious.

If you are forced to suffer through this song, train your ears to pick up the background vocals amidst the din.  You will at least get something entertaining from the song.

I know we’d have a good time
I’m your friend, I’m fun, and I’m fine
I ain’t lying