tonight, i resaw the scene where they lifted a building. see, they needed to shoot a crossbow like weapon into hte building across the street. they didn't have a good shot from either the floor above or the floor below, so they raised the entire building. puh-lease. i'm pretty sure it would have been easier (but less "cool") to just use some kind of lowering device for the cross bow.

oh, i'm talking about ocean's 12. i probably should have mentioned that.

dennis miller must die  

Posted

i have his hbo special on in the background, and he's talking about how he doesn't really believe in global warming. well, "i don't disbelieve it, but i don't necessarily believe it"

remember this?  

Posted

from wiki...

Zombo.com

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Jump to: navigation, search

Zombo.com is a humorous website created on October 10, 1999. The site consists solely of a single Macromedia Flash animation of the website's title and seven circles of alternating colours. The animation's voice-over repeatedly welcomes the viewer to the web site and claims that the viewer can do anything they want without any limitations at Zombo.com. However, when the introduction is finished, instead of a link to the main zombo.com website (which does not exist), it simply provides a link to the zombo.com newsletter for a few seconds and then goes back to the start. The dot is not pronounced by the animation, which refers to the site as "Zombocom". The site has become well known as an Internet phenomenon.

The site is believed by some to be a parody of much of the advertising of the dot-com boom, as it seems to hype up an interesting service but does not offer one. Though it continues to exist after the end of that era, it has not yet changed its animation.

Andy Milonakis  

Posted

he's older than me ?!?! he was born in 1976. He apparently has some growth defect that makes him look like a kid. Someone needs to explain his show to me, b/c not only do i not find it funny, but i can't even figure out what their attempt at humor is. and, the fact that he's not 14 makes it even more disturbing.

the odd thing about the rubik's cube story  

Posted

i'm sure you've seen the "kid solves rubik's cube in 11 seconds" story as many times i have. The odd thing is that it wasn't that much better than the old world record. In fact, the kid didn't even win first place in the competition (b/c you have to average your scores). This story is only "interesting", if you assume that he crushed the record. 11 seconds isn't interesting when 12 seconds is the standard.

people that died  

Posted

I was very excited to catch "the basketball diaries" right from the beginning tonight. every time i think this movie is on, it turns out to be that other movie, "hoop dreams".

I was a little surprised to notice that the lyrics to one of the songs in the movie matched up with the plot. So, i looked it up online, and it turns out that the song "people that died" is moderately famous. And, the artist, jim carroll, [hmm, i can't phrase this sentence correctly. jim carroll's life is the inspiration for this movie.]

my first step in fixing the NBA  

Posted

less full time outs and more 20 second time outs. 20 second time outs are actually somewhat exciting. a team on the road will call one to settle down, but sometimes the crowd gets even more revved up. It's just the right amount of time to see the replay, and discuss what the team is going to do next.

maybe turn all full time outs into 20 second times when there are 2 minutes left in the game. having a full time out after every position is brutal.

two of the worst calls ever?  

Posted

1) pitt may or may not have had a false start (it looked like the LG flinched), but then THREE colts jumped offsides and touched the offensive line. Clearly, the refs had to assume that there was a false start, but didn't see it. so what did they call? "there was no flag on the play. no player crossed the line of scrimmage". HUH? just admit you are calling a "do-over" b/c you don't know any better.

2) interception where the guy dives to catch the ball, then rolls around on the ground for several flips. As he gets up, he drops hte ball and picks it up. "after further review, the player did not have possession of the ball".

seriously, since both of these calls were made by the head ref, i have to assume that he was told to make the colts win. there's NO WAY that these two calls could be made legitimally. they were that bad.

Right on the Money  

Posted

Last night, i got excited by the idea of Clerks II. Then, i thought back and realized that Smith movies have been mediocre outside of Clerks and Chasing Amy.

Here's the link of a good rant:


am i allowed to just cut and paste the whole article? well, considering 3 people read this, i think i'm safe.

Has anyone else noticed that Kevin Smith’s movies are horrible, or wondered how it is that he’s still working?

Editor's Note - While I personally do not share this view, and Kevin Smith is actually a "friend" of EM. I thought Michael's comments were pretty valid. Check out our Exclusive interview with K.S. HERE! .

Ten years after debuting with “Clerks,” Smith seems poised to cross over from indie demigod to brand name Hollywood director. He has vowed to retire his “View Askew” alternate universe, and, with it, all of the recurring characters played by his cronies.

Smith has colluded with the Jennifer Lopez juggernaut for his upcoming movie, “Jersey Girl,” and his follow-up project will be a prequel to the Chevy Chase “Fletch” movies. Smith has also apparently reached the level, as both an auteur and as a pop cultural phenomenon, to warrant a vanity lecture DVD (“An Evening with Kevin Smith”).

As someone who has regarded his work rather dubiously for some time now, this is all a bit hard to fathom, and it seems to me that now, more than ever, the above questions beg to be addressed.
Don’t get me wrong. Like everyone else, I reserve warm and fuzzy feelings for “Clerks.” Back in ’94, who wasn’t rooting for Kevin Smith?

Who was not behind this poor would-be Woody Allen schlub from New Jersey who ran up massive credit card debts in creating that heartfelt black and white ####box of an independent film? Who did not forgive the stilted dialogue or the high school-grade acting in light of the good vibes that “Clerks” emanated, and the well-publicized background story of Smith’s struggle to get his movie made?
And what about Jason Mewes (the vocal half of the ‘Jay and Silent Bob” duo)? Wasn’t it funny how totally unimpressed this guy seemed to be by appearing in a movie? Would anyone in Hollywood have had the balls to actually cast the pot dealer who hung out in front of their neighborhood Mini-Mart in the role of the pot dealer who hangs out in front of the Mini-Mart?

Nobody liked “Clerks” more than me. I’m from New Jersey. It really is like that. And the unique profanity and banality indigenous to Jersey had waited too long to be flayed and served up on the screen.

Seizing his moment, Smith apparently reasoned that if you are to be the filmmaker laureate of New Jersey, you need to make a movie based in a mall. So, buoyed by the success of “Clerks,” a real budget, and the stuntcasting of Shannen Doherty (at that point a Hollywood untouchable), Smith followed up “Clerks” with “Mallrats.”
“Mallrats” is one of the worst films ever made. Again: I am from New Jersey. I know malls. When I was ten years old, I saw Tiffany lip-synch “I Think We’re Alone Now” at Garden State Plaza. I am the target audience.

But neither money nor Shannon Doherty could fix the myriad problems that had plagued “Clerks.” Due to the fevered pace and high volume at which much of the script of “Mallrats” is delivered, the dialogue in is actually more awkward than it was in Smith’s first movie. Witness Doherty attempting to roar through the following line: “I’m a girl, dammit! I want to do girly things! Like fix up someone’s hair and get phone calls expressing romantic sentiments!” Try spitting that one out by yourself, right now. Shannen Doherty couldn’t do it, I can’t do it, and you probably can’t either.

Throughout his career, Smith has been incapable of advancing a plot by artful or even workmanlike means. He relies heavily on conversations in which one character acts a voice of reason, breaking down a situation for the main character, and then leading him, by the nose, to enlightenment. Silent Bob is Smith’s favorite voice of reason.

In “Mallrats,” a quote from Yoda provides his token bon mots. Comic book legend Stan Lee serves as the second voice of reason, drawing parallels between Jason Lee’s problems and those of Marvel Superheroes. In yet another bit of stuntcasting, Terry from “Three’s Company” appears as the third voice of reason, playing a topless psychic with three nipples.

However, despite the presence of these and other quasi-intellectual (and quasi-intelligent) monologues, Smith’s movies are essentially nothing more than warmed over artifacts of Grade-B 1980’s cinema (witness the tri-nippled clairvoyant). No character in “Mallrats” illustrates this point more perfectly than the sadistic producer of the “Dating Game” knock-off on which the flimsy plot turns. The stock blowhard’s most notable scene involves greedily consuming pretzels which are covered with fecal matter. And let us not forget the fat guy who is obsessed with the Magic Eye, a subplot that might well have been edited out of something from Troma.

I have no problem with cheekiness, cheap laughs, or the 80’s, but one never gets the sense that Smith is trying to be self-consciously, tongue in cheek, faux ####ty. This is not John Waters. This is not Jack White letting Meg White play drums in the White Stripes. This is really the best that Kevin Smith can do.

Smith followed up “Mallrats” with his commercial breakthrough, “Chasing Amy,” the story of one Jersey’s man’s adventure in mid-90’s bisexual trendspotting. Although the movie has dated poorly, it nonetheless remains better than everything else Smith has done. He still needs three voices of reason (Jay, Silent Bob, and the gay black comic book writer) to keep his story rolling, not to mention a ham-fisted musical montage to show how and why Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams fall in love, but Adams has a winning screen personality (where did she disappear to, anyway?), and, at this point, Smith had made the novel discovery that awkward dialogue can be made less of a sore thumb if one or both of the characters is eating something while they’re talking. Indeed, a little peanut butter to gum up the pronunciation leaves the gutter Voltaire a little less naked as Ben Affleck spits it out.

Unfortunately, following that successful and critically acclaimed film, Smith opted to make his “difficult” film, and courted controversy with “Dogma.” As if often the case with controversial pop art, the film’s subversive nature only runs skin deep. On the “Evening” DVD, Smith names the Catholic ban on premarital sex as his main objection to Christian dogma. In his own words, his problem with the Catholic Church began when he was young, and realized, “I wanna #### before I get married.” Obviously, libraries are filled with books containing sophisticated attacks on God, faith, and Christianity, but nobody pickets libraries. That’s because you don’t anger the most irascible elements of the religious community by actually challenging religion; you do it by fashioning an image of Jesus’s mom with an elephant turd, and showing your work in a city run by Rudy Giuliani. Or by making a movie in which George Carlin plays a cardinal, Alanis Morrisette plays God, and a black man (Chris Rock) plays an apostle.

Now that the stink surrounding “Dogma” has gone away, the most offensive aspect of the film, the one which escaped criticism from both the political right wing and the Church, becomes increasingly clear: It is excruciatingly boring. I fell asleep the first time I watched “Dogma,” and it was chore to keep focused on the film during a more recent viewing. Unfortunately, a #### Monster and an unusually healthy serving of Jason Mewes don’t do much to help.

Following “Dogma,” Smith laid all his cards on the table, and finally let Mewes run rampant throughout his very own vehicle, “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.” The good news about “Jay and Silent Bob” is that Smith’s ability as a visual stylist is finally up to snuff with that of your average hack director. The bad news is that, despite several very funny moments, getting Mewes all of that screen time means fleshing the Jay character out to three very unflattering dimensions.

The film suffers in the same way that many SNL movies suffer; Jay is a one-note, one-joke character, and even good one-joke characters (The Ladies Man, for example) often wilt under more elaborate characterization.

Which, incidentally, is not to say that Jay is not a superb character. Like Beavis and Butthead or Eric Cartman, he has an amazing ability to do the same thing over and over again and make it funny every time. I think it is fair to say that we wouldn’t even be talking about Smith right now if he had never befriended Jason Mewes.

Speaking of Mewes: How great is it that, despite his popularity, and the fact that he plays Kevin Smith’s only dependable recurring character, Mewes seemingly has no interest in seriously pursuing a film career, outside of playing “Jay”? Consider the fact that Jason Lee was never even half as entertaining as Mewes in “Mallrats” or “Chasing Amy,” yet he has already gone so Hollywood that he’s made a chick movie with Julia Stiles, and joined the Church of Scientology.

Anyway, back to Kevin Smith:

Having put the “View Askew” world to bed for good, Smith apparently got tired of waiting for James Lipton to invite him over for a chat, so he took it upon himself to release “An Evening with Kevin Smith,” culled from footage of the director on the lecture circuit back in 2001.

The first thing one notices about the DVD (other than the “Snoogans” knit cap and the other View Askew memorabilia being hawked in the accompanying merch catalog), is the level of adoration that Smith enjoys from his fans. Outside of each of the five colleges at which Smith spoke (college students apparently comprise the bulk of his fans), we are treated to views of assorted geeks and spazzes singing Smith’s praises and parroting their favorite Smith catchphrases for the camera.

The love-in continues on a more massive scale once the cameras move inside the various auditoriums. For the first hour or so, we actually spend more time hearing about how great Kevin Smith is from his fans than hearing Smith himself speak.

I highly recommend that you skip this thing, so allow me to save you the trouble by summarizing the major points: (1) Apparently, Prince is very, very weird - like Michael Jackson without the child molestation. If you are one of those people who are waiting for Prince to turn the corner and start making good music again, it seems like you should just let that dream go. (2) The homoerotic strain of Smith’s movies extends to Smith’s personal life. One cannot escape the suspicion that all of those gay jokes involving Jay and Silent Bob are based, at least in part, on Smith’s real life obsession with Jason Mewes. I know that sounds far-fetched (not to mention slanderous), but at one point, Smith grinds his hips to mime what a Jay and Silent Bob porno flick might look like, and another time, he talks about the time he got his hands on a homemade sex tape featuring Mewes, stating his desire to “see this man in action.” (There is also – I #### you not – a set of bookends currently available for purchase which depict Jay sexually penetrating Silent Bob.)

Mewes turned up for one of the lectures, and watching him is easily the most intriguing part of “Evening.” The only remotely complete thought he utters refers to heroin, and, given his string of drug arrests, as well as how much time he spends scratching himself while on stage, it seems highly probable that he was high during his appearance. (F.Y.I: Heroin makes you itchy.) However, Smith is more than comfortable talking in Mewes’ stead. He even offers a long-winded etymology of the word “Snoogans” on Mewes behalf while Mewes gazes on.

Eventually (and I do mean eventually – the DVD is four hours long), Smith gets down to talking shop. Speaking of his motivation for making “Dogma,” he jokes, “There can be no better explanation or proof of the existence of God than the fact that I have a film career.” This is obviously self-deprecation to some degree or another, but the theory is as good as any for explaining his continuing popularity.

Though there is something to make you laugh in each of Kevin Smith’s films (usually Mewes), he has no visual style to speak of, and very little cinematic flair in any sense. The movies really just lay there.

And yet there is no denying the existence of a fan base. I guess some people like to be able to get both dick and fart jokes and psychobabble all at the same time. Smith himself has described “Mallrats” as a “smart Porky’s.”

Personally, for sophomoric humor, I’ll take the original “Porky’s.” And for smart, well, I’d prefer to endure a one-act play by an NYU undergrad.
The best thing that can be said about Smith, going all the way back to “Clerks,” is that he is a people pleaser. When we liked Jay and Silent Bob, he gave us more Jay and Silent Bob. When we were into slutty bisexual women, he gave us a slutty bisexual woman.

But I still can’t see how J-Lo’s of the world will grapple with his cumbersome dialogue, or how the characters they portray will be able to find their way in the world without Silent Bob or Stan Lee there to guide them. From here on out, Kevin Smith no longer dwells in the View Askew universe. We shall see what kind of home he makes for himself in Hollywood.

My pictures don't show up as thumbnails anymore in my folders. I think this is b/c of the new security updated i d/l for windows. This has completely ruined my picture experience. How am i supposed to go through all my digital photos?

I'm very upset.


btw, I'm just going to squint when i watch knicks games and pretend that Frye is Camby. Easily my new favorite player.

and the mavs game was fun to watch.

I'm tired of hearing about the US skeleton's coach  

Posted

for weeks now, i keep getting updated on the US skeleton's coach's situation. Some type of sexual harrassment charge. But, i've never heard what the heck a skeleton team is. Why does the media assume we know what this is? I assume it's something winter olympics related, but couldn't they give us one sentence about it?

i started this post on 12/12  

Posted

then i forgot about it. i added an ending to it just now, but then when i "published" it, it wouldn't move the date up to here. so, i'm going to repost it.

[for those of you wondering, I had to go with a playlist of slower sleater-kinney songs]

With all due respect to Einstein and Stephen Hawking, they've been looking in the wrong place for their T.O.E. (theory of everything). If one really wants to understand the mysteries of the universe and discover that one unifying force, they needn't look any further than Ocean's 12. Everything [sidenote: what in the world happens when you swallow weird and your tongue gets stuck to the roof of your mouth? why does that hurt so much? am i creating a suction that is ripping up my esophogus? oh man, that hurt] that is wrong in our society, and the universe in general, is captured in this terrible terrible movie.

Ocean's 11 was a decent movie. Not spectular by any means, but definitely watchable (and rewatchable to be honest). It was the kind of movie that would fall apart if you sat there with a notepad and tried to find plot holes, but held together if you gave it the benefit of the doubt and just sat back and enjoyed the ride. Ocean's 12's plot holes jump out at you and punch you in the face. I can't even tell you how low my expectations were going into this movie. But, somehow this movie underchieved.

One of the many problems with sequels is that the characters usually have to be more "X-treme to Max" in order to satisfy the fans. The funny guy has to be funnier, the dangerous guy has to be dangerouser, etc. etc. Ocean's 12 breaks that mold though. Instead, the characters just act completely different. Was there any mention of Danny being this legendary thief in the first movie? The way i remember it (and i might be wrong as i haven't seen 11 in awhile) was that Danny was a decent thief who was looking for one more big score before he hung it up. He had the plan, but needed the help of the 10 other specific experts. Now, Danny is so famous, that the plot actually centers around another thief being jealous of his reputation.

Matt Damon's character (linus) was the rookie of the group in 11. But, he had a decent reputation because his father had been a pro. In 12, he starts out by completely kissing Danny's ass, and then has an "aw shucks" attitude with Brad Pitt's character. "please let me have a bigger role in this thing. I'll be ever so grateful". Where is this coming from? He didn't act like this in the first movie. Oh yeah, b/c this new characteristic will fit into the plot (more on that later).

Wow, i just saw a "commercial" (is that the right word?) for ocean's 12 on hbo and my hate started boiling. I started to think about all the things i hated about this movie, and then i remembered that i had started a rant on it, but got sidetracked. Sure enough, the above was written weeks ago. I can't even remember the movie enough to continue. things are popping into my head right now, but i'm not at all confident that i can remember everything. so i'm not going to try. i can't do it justice.

this move was bad. fin.

I've figured out how to enjoy espn's Page Two  

Posted

the trick is to avoid any kind of "original" material. Here is a link of funny stories that happened in 2005. Each one is prefaced with a "clever" title. Ignore it. It's painful to read. But some of the stories are just ridiculous. There is also a 2nd part to this article, and that might be funnier than the first.

here's the link

mental note to self:  

Posted

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/columns/story?columnist=clayton_john&id=2275183

this article was very premature. if i ever sober up, i'll write a rant on it.