Is it fat in here, or is it just me?

had to go somehere yesterday and couldn't fit into my suit pants anymore. always a great way to start the day.

in unrelated clothing news, something has come aloose in the sole of my shoe and rattles around when i walk. i think this means i have to buy a new pair of shoes.

Let's do some reviews, shall we? I did promise lots if them, after all. Not much middle ground here, some real duds and a few great efforts.

*****

Meet Joe Black

I'm a big fan of otherworldy topics when done correctly (Dogma is by far the best to pull it off in movie form), so i thought Meet Joe Black might be worth the risk, despite the obvious chick-flick perils. i finally got a chance to watch it the other day when it came on tv.

Worst movie ever.

I'm all for temporary suspension of belief (or whatever the technical phrase for "just go with it" is in the world of fiction), but even in Pretendland, 1 + 1 has to equal 2.

Spoiler Alert

Take for example, the end of the movie when the daughter is talking to brad pitt and says "wish you could have known my father," an obvious reference to the fact that she knows her father is dead. Which means that her father's body is on the other side of the hill. So what does she do? she walks off with Brad Pitt back to the party, just leaving her dead father out there.

End Spoiler

That's not even the most exasperating flaw in the movie, just the easiest to explain. Oh wait, there is another one pretty easy to explain. I'll just call it the "i don't know what peanut butter is but i am intimately familiar with the detailed workings of the IRS" theme.

Anthony Hopkins is the only redeeming part of this movie.

Score: 3 out of 10

*****

The Devil's Apocrypha by John De Vito

What Dogma is to otherworldly movies, I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan is to books . I stumbled across the De Vito book when looking for something else by Duncan. I had enjoyed another book Duncan wrote and wanted to see what else was out there.

I decided to get The Devil's Apocrypha because it was fairly cheap. It's the creation story told by the losers, so to speak.

Worst book ever.

I made it through the forward, barely, where the author misspelled "lose" as "loose" twice. And on the offchance he meant to use the word "loose," he used it incorrectly. So i stopped reading it.

I will keep this book for the rest of my life because 1)I'm opposed to throwing away books, and 2) I'm even more opposed to giving someone else an opportunity to read this literary abortion.

Score: 0 out of 10

****

Solomon vs. Lord by Paul Levine

Ah, sweet relief. A funny courtroom novel that, despite being pretty long, never gets dull.

At parts it gets a tad predictable, but i always tell myself "if things didn't work out the way they did, the story wouldn't have been worth telling."

The pace and storytelling makes up for any predictability problems, and even though how the case will be solved becomes apparent, Levine doesn't give away what the resolution actually is too early. I actually wondered if he did it on purpose, sort of "hey, let me make the reader feel smart, and he'll be happy with himself and like the book more."

Score 8.9 out of 10.

****

Torpedo Juice by Tim Dorsey

Picture the funniest person you know simultaneously being on speed yet having the self control to sit down and write a book. That's Tim Dorsey, the endlessly funny creater of Serge Storms, the serial killer with a heart.

I can't remember exactly how many of Dorsey's books i've read, but you need to grab some of his stuff if you haven't before. If you like Carl Hiassen, you'll enjoy Dorsey.

The basic premise is Storms is a mentally unbalanced lover of all things South Florida. he is prone to knee-jerk obsessions and finding creative ways to kill the bad guys. In Torpedo Juice, he catches a guy robbing an elderly couple. Serge takes the robber, makes him swallow a handful of bullets then runs him through an MRI machine.

Lots of amusing characters and Dorsey's outlandish humor is outdone only by his mastery of subtle humor.

Score: 8.7 out of 10

*****

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

Got this a couple of days before Vonnegut died after a coworker recommended it.

Very good. It's sort of about two people, but then it's also more about two characters in a book, but then again, it's more about the relationship between an author and his characters.

The sort of thing that's easy to see why people would lift Vonnegut up as an icon. It didn't completely knock my socks off, but it's definitely a case where the way the story is presented adds a ton to the story itself. brilliantly done.

I give it 8.5 *'s out of 10 *'s

*****

A note on the scoring.

You might notice that I've scored two books higher than another novel considered an all-time classic. This does not necessarily mean that the other books are better than Breakfast of Champions.

In an intellectual environment (which i tend to avoid) i would tell you that Breakfast of Champions is easily the best of the books i reviewed. Think of it like this, I know that Tom Brady is a better quarterback than Michael Vick, but i enjoy watching Vick more.

Capische?

a badge of teenage film stars, hash bars, cherry mash and tinfoil tiaras

Watched Idiocracy last night.

I had big hopes for it, but it didn't pan out.

The idea is brilliant. Stupid people are reproducing faster than smart people.

Average 2005 person ends up in 2505 and wakes up as the smartest person alive.

Luke Wilson's character learns of his status after being arrested in the future and taking an aptitude test to see what his prison job should be. The question: If you have a five gallon bucket and a two-gallon bucket, how many buckets do you have?

Wilson is charged with saving a civilization whose academy award winning screen play is a movie called "Ass" and the top-rated show is "Ow, My Balls" on the Violence Channel.

Sounds funny right?

It should have been (with the added bonus of being relevant social satire, to boot). But the laughs were noticeably absent.

I give it a 6 out of 10. The idea is great, the execution in lacking. I'd watch it again without complaint, but probably not on purpose. Even though i didn't particularly like it, i still recommend giving it a shot if you haven't seen it yet.

I live in the Village, wherever I go I walk to. I keep my friends around so i have someone to talk to

Hi, everybody.

Work has been kicking my arse of late, which is the reason behind the extended absence.

SPOILER WARNING - I'm going to give a movie review lower down, so if you haven't watched The Departed yet, and plan to, you might want to skip it. I plan on ruining the ending in pretty specific detail.

Since we last talked, a number of things have happened. so i guess i'll just type whatever comes to mind.

First, I had a birthday.

Turned 27 on 02-27-2007. That should be all sorts of good luck or something. haven't won the lottery yet, though.

Daylight Savings Time is here. boo! exclamation mark.
radio signals suck when i leave the house and it's still dark, so i didn't get to enjoy my usual sports radio talk this morning. Maybe this is a sign that i should get satellite radio.

This also means the return of Working in the Yard season. We have centipede grass, which looks all brown and gnarly in the winter, but also means that i only have to mow seven or eight months a year.

So i have mixed emotions right now. I'm inherently opposed to performing manual labor, but there's also a pretty cool feeling when your yard looks better than your neighbors' and only marginally worse than the yard-obsessed people elsewhere in the subdivision.

The people we bought the house from were big-time green thumbs, which means our garden looks muy shitastic compared to how it looked a year and a half ago. so we're going to get rid of the high-maintanace stuff (those are easily identified by their prominent being-dead characteristics) and go with fewer plants.

I, actually, just want to pay people to take care of the garden, but courtney's too lazy to do that.

we went to Home Depot yesterday and bought some weed killin', plant diggin' up stuff, along with some waterhose roll-up thingies. some people down here call it a hose pipe, i call it a waterhose, mmhmmm.

Had some delicious crawfish from Sammy's in Baton Rouge and some very-good-but-not-quite-great crawfish from the Boiling Pot in Madisonville. If the Boiling Pot had potatoes and corn, it could have earned a higher ranking. they had some good flaor, but not eye-sell-shut spicyness that i like in a crawfish. Sammy's provided all the above.

***SPOILER ALERT***

Watched The Departed this weekend. Good movie.

Aside from the occasional "Ok, i guess i missed something" moments, my biggest problem with the movie is that I like there to be a clear winner, even if it's the bad guy.

After DiCaprio got plugged, I was rooting for Damon to get away with it.

When everybody ended up getting killed, i was kind of like "eh."

***END SPOILER***

So now, I'm just going to take up some space, so people who don't want to read the review, don't accidentally glance up and see something.

BEGIN POINTLESS SPACE TAKING-UPPING

Man, this is really considerate of me.

A lot of people wouldn't go through this much trouble.

But there's no length i won't go to for my friends.

A real saint, i tell ya.

END POINTLESS SPACE TAKING-UPPING

So, I give The Departed a 7.67 out of 10. I'd definitely recommend it. And i'd watch it again, but probably wouldn't buy it unless it was one of those 4 for $20 deals or something like that. But I also don't typically buy many DVD's. even the ones i really like.

Freecos?

man, it's been almost a week already. where to begin?

Of course, I was obviously pleased with the results of the sugar bowl.

and i'm not real happy with saban taking the alabama job. i can understand leaving LSU for the NFL if it's truly your dream. and i can understand leaving the NFL because it's not what you expected/wanted. but if you leave LSU for the right reasons, you don't take a job with a school in their freaking division.

i had insomnia pretty bad over the stretch of a few days between christmas and new year's. Check out this joke i thought of while drinking wine at 4 a.m. to try and knock myself out:

What vegetable goes best with extra duck?
Asparagoose!

oh man, that's awesome. if you look closely, you'll see that there are actually two jokes in there.

I kind of thought the whole House-drug arrest problem worked itself out a little too nicely on House last night, but all-in-all it was an excellent episode. i chortled a couple of times. easily the best show on television right now.

i can't promise i will be there on opening night, but i will see this movie...




and just because i'm so happy about it, a little classic lagniappe...

He aw, He aw, He always likes to be called Albert

Hey everybody.

It's been a while. Hope the end of everyone's year proved to be relaxing and enjoyable and the start of 2007 is also the balls.

speaking of balls, courtney was in Times Square Sunday night to witness the magic. i was on our couch watching the 40-year-old virgin.

speaking of virgins, my friend michael gave me a cool t-shirt for christmas. "I gave my word to stop at third. 1987 suffolk county teen abstinence day."

speaking of teens, didn't get much sleep new year's eve because the kid next door shot firecrackers outside my bedroom window until about 3 a.m. it was the third straight night i had trouble sleeping.

in fact, friday night/saturday morning i tried the whole "drink wine at 4 a.m. to fall asleep" strategy but it didn't work too well. after waking up at 2, i finally fell back asleep around 9 a.m. after much reading, some drinking, and watching "Young Frankenstein."

One last interesting tidbit before I go:

Chicago Bears defensive linemen Tank Johnson was arrested on gun charges a while back. Then a month or so ago, police searched his house and found more guns. Johnson's body guard was in the house and was arrested on marijuana charges. a couple of nights later, the body guard was killed outside a night club in a shooting.

The other night, denver broncos player darrent williams was killed in a shooting outside a night club.

The common thread? Both Tank Johnson and Darrent Williams have their full first and last names on the back of their jerseys.