I heard this on the radio this morning and had to share.  Director Mike Figgis (who directed Leaving Las Vegas) was going through security at LAX, when he was asked the reason for his visit.  “I’m here to shoot a pilot.”

It’s not clear if he was making a dumb joke, or if he just wasn’t thinking (I’m inclined to believe the latter).  You can read more here, if you’d like.

You’re not a pilot:  I know every pilot in the world!

Update: as Peter pointed out, this story is almost entirely fictional.  Oh well, it sounded plausible.

No, and I don’t care.

I just watched that video of Kramer flipping out after being heckled by some black audience members.  I know it’s week-old news but I’ll comment anyway.  So I guess these guys had been getting on his nerves the whole evening and he wanted to make fun of them in a shocking way, but he clearly went a little far.  In the subsequent apology on Letterman, a lot of the audience was laughing at first—understandably, they probably thought it was a bit, since most of Dave’s audience is probably people on vacation.  I find it ironic that the apology happened there because Jerry Seinfeld was on that night, so he was again riding Jerry’s coattails.

What is funny (to me, anyway) is that there was an episode of Seinfeld that was actually about hecklers, where Jerry went to where a heckler worked and started heckling him while he was doing his job.  Maybe that’s what Kramer should have done.

Well I thought I’d have more to say about this topic when I started typing this, but I’m realizing that I really don’t care what someone I’ve never met says to someone I’ve never met in a city I’ve never been to.  So I’ll just leave you with a funny parody of the event to watch.

On Tuesday I was thinking how totally awesome it would be if there was a major terrorist attack.  I mean, except for the part where lots of people would die and we would launch a poorly planned war against people who had nothing to do with the attacks.  But aside from that, wouldn’t it be funny if people talked about “6/6/6,” in the same manner they speak of “9/11” today?  And events would be dated as pre-6/6/6 and post-6/6/6.  And imagine the number of people who would believe the attack signaled the end of the world because of the date.  It would be deliciously chaotic.  Oh well.  Maybe in a hundred years the next 6/6/6 will be more interesting.

PS: I do know that the actual date was 6/6/06.  But you know the event would quickly come to be known as 6/6/6.

Since everyone else is talking about Wii, I thought I’d weigh in.  I guess I’m a member of the group Tycho described as “people who like it because they are ‘above the fray,’” but really I think it is because I never liked “Revolution” all that much to begin with.  I’ve been worried that they were going to turn the code name into the official name, as they did with the Nintendo DS (which I still think is a pretty boring name).

When I first saw it I didn’t like it because I didn’t know how to pronounce it (my first guess was “wee-eye”, like in radii).  Once I got used to automatically thinking “we,” it started to grow on me.  I think a year from now no one will really have a problem with the name.  I mean, really, didn’t you think “iPod” was a dumb name the first time you heard it?  But it seems to have worked for them and no one really questions it now.

The thing that does bother me is the grammar.  Reading a sentence that begins “Wii is” just makes me want to hit someone with a third grade English book.  The term is likewise distasteful as a direct object: “It’s about Wii.”  I naturally want to say “It’s about Uus” or something.

One last thing- I’m going to call the controller the “wiimote.”  I haven’t seen anyone say that in any of the five or six news/blog posts I’ve read about the topic.  I’m so clever.

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.