Here's Why I Hate Apple

When I'm trying to click on an icon and accidentally click in the tiny space between the icon itself and the title of the icon, it doesn't register! As if I'm double-clicking blank space!

Come on, my own computer. Give me the mulligan here.

Rescued!

Last night, at about 12:15, my lady called me on the way over to my apartment. She told me she had been stopped on the street by a weird woman who was trying to rescue a runaway possum. I told her I'd meet her on the street to lend a hand. Hey. I'd never seen a possum.

Turns out they are gross, cute, docile and scary all at once. Gross tail. Cute white face! Gross misshapen nose. Cute beady eyes! Scary mouth that opens too wide. Fluffy bean-shaped body! Kind and quiet. But might be rabid!

When I arrived at the scene, Catherine was holding a large towel and the weird woman was walking around the possum, saying "hi" over and over again in an incredibly creepy, annoying manner that reminded me of the girl in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (which you should totally see). Thankfully, there was some small reason for the "hi"-ing; she was trying to distract the little critter while Catherine pounced on it, wrapped it in the towel and tossed her into a large cage that the woman happened to have in her apartment. It must be said: Catherine's possum-catching abilities were a wonder to behold. She got that possum in that cage on the first try, and with such grace that the possum wasn't even frightened.

With the calm, happy possum sitting plumply in its cage, my fear of rabies was swiftly replaced by my fear of Park Slope hippies. The weird woman had that big cage ready to go because she rescues animals constantly. The number of rescue stories she spouted led us to believe that maybe not all these animals were in need of rescue; it's not like I walk by runaway animals every day and ignore them. How does she find them all? Plus, she complained that her landlord always tries to evict her when she tries to take in wild animals and that he probably wouldn't let her keep a possum. Also, she runs a business where she goes around saying hi to people's animals or something (trust me, this is not much of a simplification).

Without needlessly trashing her any further here, I'll sum up by saying that, as we helped her carry the cage up to Prospect Park (apparently a second-best to letting her keep a possum in her apartment), we almost regretted helping her save the little furry bean. It generated a strange cognitive dissonance to help someone do a good deed and be really pissed off at them at the same time.

Any, we helped a creepy idiot save a possum! And when we opened the cage in the park, it scampered around and it was totally adorable. THE END.

Wow

I do not agree.

I love Futurama, but the second half of this movie is meandering, off-tone and boring. The first one definitely has its problems, but at least it's pretty consistent throughout.

I will say these things though: the first half hour is amazing, and I can see a world where, if it's split up for Comedy Central in just the right ways, you can get pretty solid episodes out of it. And the Grand Midwife is awesome.

But as a movie? Fneh.

Wall-E vs. Wanted

This weekend, I saw two movies that begin with a "Wa". But boy, were they DIFFERENT movies!!!

How were they different, you may ask? WELL:

1) Wall-E might be the most lovingly made, heartbreakingly lovely movie about love I've ever seen.
2) Wanted might just be the most hateful movie I've ever seen.

I will admit, my perceptions of Wanted may have been tainted by the fact that I saw it after Wall-E and that the dichotomy of love vs. hate makes for a more interesting blog post (hopefully). But man, Wanted made it a POINT to show how miserable and pathetic the miserable/pathetic characters were. Not to mention the audience.

SPOILER ALERT (for Wanted, not Wall-E):

The last line is James McAvoy looking at the camera and asking, angrily, "(I did this cool thing that you're watching now), so what the fuck did you do today?" I saw your movie! Stop yelling at me! I am positive that even supercool assassins watch movies too.

Anyway, railing against Wanted is less embarrassing than gushing about how Wall-E might be my favorite movie ever, so I'll stop there.

Things that affect my enjoyment of apples positively and negatively, respectively.

THING 1

Thanks to the awesome people at Serious Eats, I now know how to tell if my apple is organic or conventional. Since some grocery stores in Brooklyn have a pesky habit of not labeling things.

THING 2

Some hell-bound idiot in my office has either stolen or thrown out my peanut butter. GOD FRICKING DAMMIT.

Kill Me

Please.

While The Food Network's In Firing Mode

PLEASE FIRE/KILL THIS WOMAN.

Please.

Please Please Please.

Via.

Chili's Big Mouth Bites

Just saw a commercial for this on ye olde television:



BIG MOUTH® BITES*
Enjoy a serving of four savory mini beef burgers topped with applewood smoked bacon, American cheese, sauteed onions and Ranch dressing on a sesame seed buns. Served with crispy onion strings, homestyle fries and jalapeño-ranch dressing on the side.


You read correctly. These burgers have RANCH DRESSING ON THEM.

AND ENTIRELY DIFFERENT RANCH DRESSING ON THE SIDE.

What has become of our world???

Unrelated note: Anyone want to go to Chilis with me?

I "lost" my time slot! Ah HAHAHAsob.

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Dear America,

F**k you. Seriously. You guys suck.

Mary Poppins

So I went to see this on Broadway the other day. I really didn't like it.

Rather than go too far into what I didn't like about it (and remember, I'm coming from a very different place on this), I'll just quote you an excerpt from the program that I found appropriately foreboding:

"For the stage musical, [the adapters] agreed, they would follow the dictates of modern musical theater, wherein songs exist to carry the narrative, to reveal character, and to set mood, not just for entertainment, however entertaining they may be (like the "laughing gas" tea party in the film)."

Yeah, my problem with Mary Poppins has always been those entertaining songs distracting focus from the plot.

Fandango and Facebook are Fucking.

Alright, Fandango and Facebook. You both suck.

Sure, I'm going to see Beowulf in 3-D IMAX tomorrow.* That doesn't mean I'm proud of it. In fact, I'm pretty embarrassed about it.

But instead of getting to bottle up my shame, Fandango has chosen to hawk it on the electronic superhighway, by automatically adding a notice to my Facebook profile stating that I bought advance tickets to Beowulf. At no point did Fandango or Facebook stop to ask my permission about this.

Thanks a lot. Now everyone knows I'm a sucker. Not that they didn't know before, but now they have proof.


*I'm not going to see Beowulf under any pretense that it will be good; I've just never seen a movie in 3D IMAX before and I figured this would be a good introduction. Whenever they put feature films on IMAX, I never want to see them for fear that the enormity of the visuals will overwhelm and distract me from other aspects of the film. I figured I should be ignoring all of this film's other aspects anyway. Thus concludes my flimsy excuse.

Rome

So I just finished "Rome" yesterday.

Ya know, for possibly the most well-produced, well-acted, well-done television shows I've ever watched, its ending really sucked.

It's not even that they didn't make it special. It was actively bad. They ended it like it was a schmaltzy family comedy instead of a 22 hour epic. I was stunned.

Now I'm just talking about the last five, ten minutes here. The rest of the episode is great. And the rest of the series is spectacular. Go watch it all.

I'll help you: www.netflix.com

Seriously, amazing.

The Cable Guy

Just out of curiousity, does anyone have a GOOD story about their cable company? Like "They made an appointment between 10 and 2, showed up at 10, solved my problem immediately, in a way I could not have solved it myself*, and now me and the cable guy are best friends!"

Just curious.


*i.e., not just cycling the power and telling you the box is fixed.

This Guy Behind Me

The past two days I've been working in the same room as a friend of mine, Dan Klein from Pangaea 3000.

Now instead of getting to front of a computer with headphones on for eight hours straight, this guy wants to "joke around" and "talk" every forty minutes or so. Blech.

I hate human relationships.


PS Nah, Dan's great.

Help Me With My Trash

The currently top featured video on YouTube is this:



If you read the description (and I guess, watch the video or something), it doesn't seem that bad; it's actually about recycling and being kind to people and whatever.

But when you just look at the picture, and the title, it really seems like some guy decided to ask his loyal viewers what he should put in the garbage today. And most likely, the video would him being like: "Hey, guys, thanks so much for your comments and views, I really appreciate it. So listen, I have this milk carton I finished today, and I was wondering if I should throw it out in the garbage? Also, this banana peel, this tin can, and this old shoe*."

And then he got featured on the front page of YouTube for it.

Which is actually not a ridiculous series of events, except that it is. You know what I mean?

The internet sucks.

*In this scenario, he only has garbage that would be regularly eaten by a goat.

Stuck

All, right what do people do when they get songs stuck in their heads? I am now in the middle of my second week of being unable to think of anything but Feist's "1234," and it's starting to impact my life negatively:

1) My head is throbbing from thinking about it too much. It's actually a piercing annoyance at this point. So from a purely physical perspective, it's not good.

2) I have ceased to enjoy a wonderful, wonderful song because I have completely overdosed on it. And it really is very good.

3) My new job(!) requires watching and listening to things on a computer and that is hard to do when you are, instead, watching the video displayed below.

4) It has started forcing me to do everything in fours.

In case you haven't seen it for whatever reason:

Wonder!!!

Will there ever be a movie quite so precious as this Thanksgiving's Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium?

Answer: No.

I'm seriously considering standing outside the theater, and stabbing anyone who pays to go see this movie. You know, just to give 'em a little taste of reality.

Mandy Moore's "Umbrella"

To be perfectly honest, I've always wanted to see Mandy Moore cover a Rhianna song while trying to stuff a mic up her own nose.

Marni tells me this is a "thing;" meaning people doing non-ironic covers of "Umbrella."

Can somebody please explain this to me? Because I don't get it.

On The Lot Finale

In case you're not sick of hearing me write about On The Lot, here's a brief note about the "season" finale. After Will Bingham won (good) on the live show tonight, he got into a Limo outside the movie theater/audience area, and drove over to Dreamworks Studios, where Steven Spielberg congratulated him, and welcomed him into the grounds, handing him a key to his own office.

Couple of fun facts:

- "On The Lot" is broadcast live on the East Coast, so supposedly, this was happening in real time.

- The area where Will got into the limo that was to take him to Dreamworks is the back of the soundstage the show is filmed on, which doesn't have any sort of exit. You can see the limo start to drive, and then roll to a stop about 10 seconds later right before they cut to commercial.

- Even more ridiculous is Will driving RIGHT THEN to start his job at Dreamworks/meet Steven Spielberg, which happened after the three minute commercial break. "On the Lot" is filmed at CBS Studios... Which is at least 30 minutes away from Dreamworks.

I'm not so naive as to think that real-time TV is filmed in actual real-time (it's not), but here's the annoying thing: You just won a million dollars, and your dream job of directing a feature film. So what do you do? Get into a fake limo and fake drive somewhere. Better than that, what better way to spend your week worrying about whether you won, than taking a day to pre-tape a fake greeting with Steven Spielberg congratulating you on winning, then watching two other guys taping the same exact greeting. Guh.