Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Fuck you, Baltimore!

My roommate from two years ago called me this morning and told me straight away to look at the Baltimore Sun's website. I did and found a picture of our old backyard right on the front page, which was cool. Then I read the caption.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Filminess

I've seen over one movie this summer (two), so it's time I began a rundown of this season's coleslew of upcoming bratwurstbusters.

NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD: The Wild Untold Story of Ozplotation
--This movie I actually saw. Pretty good, except when Quentin Tarentino forced his way on set and wouldn't leave until he'd talked over half the movie. NQH:TWUSOO basically runs down a list of movies that make you think "I should totally see that!" for ten seconds, then forget what movie's called. The director, Mark Heart-Throb Hartley, took questions afterward, but I got nervous. Instead of asking him if he thought Australia were too late on the scene to ever be a significant contributor to international film aesthetic, I leaped up from my seat and ran screaming from the theater. OMG so embarassing.
BEST SCENE - Whenever Tarantino shut up.


















GI JOE/G FORCE
I can never keep these two straight, maybe becayse my brother Jack had guinea pigs growing up and I had GI Joe dolls and the two would often fight each other in pitched battles of my own design (imagine GI Joes armed only with celery and carrots). Personally, I wish the films existed as they do in mind, where GI Joes and G Forces must work together to defeat Cobra Verde, starring Klaus Kinski.














BEST SCENE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q85Tq3C6Bcc

Focus on: DENNIS QUAID






















The night sky just got a little brighter! All hail the return of Dragonheart's superstar! I thought DQ retired from acting after a football injury sustained during Any Given Sunday, but sports science or poverty has thrust him bodily back into the limelight. DQ will be cast in G-Force/iJoe as the Duke, a role originally slated for Chewbaca, but who serendipitously had to return to Endor for annual Life-Day festivities. After he convinced the casting director that he was Harrison Ford, boom! DQ found life after Enemy Mine.
Actually the only other upcoming movie DQ seems to be slated for is Legion, so you can unfocus on him now.

LEGION, or 2 Paradise 2 Lost
DQ (see above) plays a shotgun-wielding, angel-perforating desert-rat who has to hold out in a backwater diner against the Biblical apocalypse. I doubt the Church will be giving any positive reviews to an end-of-days portrayal wherein His servants are dispatched with mere buckshot, but I'm definitely going to wear my Wim Wenders shirt when I see it.























BEST SCENE: Lost in a reverie, Lucifer waxes maudlin about Paradise while DQ wails softly on a guitar.

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (sic)
I think GI Jews scalp comic-book Nazis. Brad Pitt tries to look good with a moustache. There's some babes.
BEST SCENE: Honestly, I've stopped caring about this particular review.

NEW MOON
I thought at first this would be the sequel to Moon with Sam Rockwell, but it's apparently about vampires, who have unfortunately never enjoyed popularity with the young people. The movie starts with the Cullen family spending a fun day at Boomers. After their superhuman abilities end up destroying the batting cages, mini-golf and DDR machines, the one dude from before (Rob? Ian?) decides he has to hide Bella yet again from vampires more awesome than himself. His family helps hide her in an aquarium, where a lot of scenes of the young lovers gazing whistfully at each other through glass walls are symbolic of forbidden love or mortality vs immortality or the Book of Mormon or something. The twist here is that instead of turning into bats, the vampires turn into bat rays. Oh no!
In the end, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht devours everyone concerned, starring (again) Klaus Kinski.

















BEST SCENE: Did you read the part about the Cullen family doing DDR? That's pretty funny.

WOLFMAN
I thought this was going to be an incredibly silly movie--then I saw this:













HOWWWWWWWWWWL! Unfortunately, there's going to be a love story and some kind of sympathetic plea for the "monster", but no one's going to believe any of that. If the creators of Wolfman want to make a really scary movie, they'll just let Benicio Del Toro jump around snarling and growling for an hour.
BEST SCENE: During the credits they might have outtakes. I love those. Especially Rush Hour.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

From SigAlert

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

(Fake) Spirits Review


Ansia Mescal comes from Guadalajara, where the Sanbenito family has been distilling it for 13 generations (or since 1972l). The first thing I noticed about Ansia was the heft of its bottle. The 750 ml bowling pin-shaped vessel was fully 6 pounds dry when I placed it on the scale this morning. Throughout the previous evening, I discovered that it is virtually indestructible. This feature, coupled with the handy wrist-lanyard attached at the bottle mouth, made the bottle an invaluable tool for dealing with the ill-effects of drinking a bottle of mescal (i.e. by allowing you to drink water, fend off neon wolves, bludgeon apart a bedroom door that may or may not be your own, et cetera).
Ansia's taste is akin to pueblo ash and salty tears. Straight, it has a nose capable of stunning a man, or stunning a room full of men (angry men) when regurgitated. Unlike most mescals, the maguey worm is not dead at the time of bottling. I discovered this soon after finishing the bottle. Presumably, this had something to do with the night's subsequent events (real or imagined), although the reader is encouraged to discover for himself just how far the fabric of reality will stretch before snapping back violently into a strange, horrible new morning.

Rottersand Beer is brewed in Bremen, and is unique for being the only beer exported to America in the notorious "Panzerfass" 3 L can. The taste is industrially advanced, with nuances of iron, charcoal and diesel. Originally developed by a Romanian firm to stretch dwindling oil supplies at the end of WWII, Rottersand invariably became the most popular beverage of the Third Rich's pit crews, causing suicidal breakdowns in even the sturdiest of motors.

Edgar Allen Porto is bottled somewhere between Baltimore and Philadelphia according to the sticker. It comes in a re-purposed half-gallon plastic milk container, and can be purchased from select few distributors (namely Crowman Zeke down by the tracks). When purchasing EAP, it is important to be either armed, a bit mad, or a bit suicidal.
The taste is violent, like grape juice mixed with some very bitter stimulants/opiates, and the "trick" (according to the seller) is to get it all down without stopping. I held it down for about six seconds, but the derelicts accompanying me were able to stomach an entire half gallon at a time, "time" here meaning six days of agitated wakefulness ending inevitably in the police cooler or at the bottom of a ditch, dead or not yet dead.




Sueur du Cheval Champagne is a domestic sparkling wine from Champaign, Illinois. It comes in a 2 L Glassic (R) bottle, and features artwork by famed Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski (see above). It is noted for its unusual carbonation, which gives each bottle an estimated internal pressure of 53,000 psi. Uncorking the bottle is best done outside in a relatively isolated area, as the .50 caliber Cheval corks have been known to travel up to 43 miles at speeds exceeding 3,000 mph (at time of uncorking).
Cheval is a favorite among sportsmen, who use it for both ballistic and pheremonal purposes. The secret ingredient in Cheval is rumored to be the menstraul blood from a mare whose mother has died in the process of foaling. Although this is only a very provocative rumor, it does explain Cheval's strange red colloration. As it is currently denounced by the Catholic Church and banned by numerous consumer advocacy groups (including the Knights of Columbus, the NSA and the Klan), getting hold of a bottle might be a difficult task.

What L'France Absinthe lacks in identifying bottle features (a label, for instance), it makes up for in character (it glows in the dark--actually, just glows all the time). Absinthe has recently been legalized in America, but this concoction hearkens back to the old days of "chasing the green fairy" and "gibbering from shadowy corners". Exported from an undisclosed port somewhere near Bucharest, L'France is not actually French absinthe, but an unholy relic of the Ottoman Empire. By the time L'France had become popular in Constantinople (1914), there was very little the already-crumbling imperial government could do to contain the epidemic; and like the plague 500 years before it, L'France was soon knocking on the doors of all Europe's poor. Nor has the ghastly specter of L'France entirely vanished. INTERPOL is currently working on stemming distribution, with mixed results.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Protoblog

I've come over to the Google blog hosting service because it has more features. God knows I love features. For instance, the below text "here" is really a URL (or "Ultra-realistic location")!

Here is the link to the glory that was my Tumblr blog.