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Thursday, December 15, 2005

Silverback Mountain

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

I feel like I've been on a great rollercoaster ride tonight! Yeah, I just came from seeing KING KONG... and as I predicted, it was indeed geek porn. My nipples got erect as soon as the fog hit the ship and didn't go back to normal until ...well... nope, still not yet.

I've read some shitnick reviews where the critic was too full of bile to like the ride, saying things like, "Our response to the ape's doom, once touched by authentic tragedy, is now marked by relief that this wretchedly excessive movie is finally over." Fuck you, Richard Corliss of Time. You people have been on my shit list ever since that piece you did for the 2000 election, using me as your lead in and making me look like a poverty stricken moron. Now, you're dead to me. Dead, I say!

First of all, did you ever actually see the original? There was no sympathy for the beast in that one. He was pure spectacle and sympathy was waaaaay down the list of what you would have felt for him at the time. And if you didn't feel sympathy this go-round, then I'm gonna guess someone wasn't breastfed as a babe. Aside from that, this pic is full of nuggets of goodness and if you were over-powered by all the "excessiveness," then maybe you're just not man enough for this film. Scratch that... you're not WOman enough for this film.

Jackson is a reader, plain and simple, and he will put homages to his favorite influences everywhere he can possibly put them. He also knows that his fans are readers and he hides these nuggets in the frame every chance he gets. Were you just paying attention to the obvious Joseph Conrad book that you missed all the Melville? Did you miss the subtle movie posters in the backgrounds that were actually tributes to the original writers, Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace, and director and cast? Hell, he even threw in references to his own silly movies... Sumatran Rat Monkey, anyone?

"Even if this were the first gorilla-in-love movie ever made, audiences would come away vaguely dissatisfied, suspecting there was an intriguing idea buried somewhere in here, but it didn't quite come off." What do you want, Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronical? Perhaps you missed a key line in the movie and were watching the film as Ann had read Jack's script... "it's in the subtext," dork. Just because the CGI is a spectacle doesn't mean that Jackson thinks he has to hold your hand through the fucking epic. Think steel industry and next time count the number of uses you see. Ever hear of the "robber barons?" Andrew Carnegie ring a bell? How about J.P. Morgan? Cornelius Vanderbilt? John D. Rockefeller? They were industry monopolists AND bankers at the same time... a time that established the class system we have today: when ten percent of American businessmen controlled over 90 percent of US wealth. Who financed the first 2 world wars, do you think? Now, what context does that remind you of today.

Want to read more into the new context that he's created between "beauty and the beast?" I'll spare you the lengthy contrasting comparisons and let you make up your own mind, along with the whole "Schrodinger's Cat" principle, love and its consequences, and what he's trying to say about our relationship with nature. You all need to have something to discuss on your own after you see it, right? Or not. Whatever.

Regardless of my geek rant above, there is a part of me that was hoping for some luggage abuse. Or perhaps a giant crap fling... a la GHOSTBUSTERS when the Stay Puft Marshmellow man's melted remains falls on the bad guy from the rooftop way above. C'mon! Crap from the Empire State Building! You know you've all thought about that yourselves. Hell, he could have taken out several planes in one fecal curveball!

Anyway, to all you crap flinging critics out there, my guess is you're just posturing to Jackson's alpha male, chest-pounding movie skillz. To that I say: Go get a real job, poopieheads!

Monday, December 05, 2005

6 Days, 7 Hours, and some change...

No, not until KONG is released.

I'm talking about the time left until my 35th birthday, which is December 12th.

And this year, I'm expecting that pony, dammit!


"Probably the worst thing about having King Kong go rampid in your town would be the huge, monster genitalia." --Jack Handey

Friday, December 02, 2005

Misery Loves Lompany

I've been spending the last 4 months moping and depressed that every day I try to find a job in my field and every day I've faced some sort of rejection (no one returns my calls... no one acknowledges that I even submitted to their application process... etc.) I finished a Masters degree thinking there'd be jobs gallore just waiting for me and guess what... I get the old "over-qualified" cold shoulder instead.

In addition, my parents (and frankly, everyone I know who doesn't understand this phenomenon on a first person basis) have been bumming me on a daily basis by their attempts to tell me that this situation is all in my head and I'm just not trying to find anything. Yeah, right. YOU try getting in touch with potential employers who could give a rat's ass about you and don't even acknowledge your existence with a "thanks, but we've already found someone" response... let's see how many it takes before you're depressed as hell too.

Quite simply, Atlanta's job market sucks right now. All you people who keep moving here... GO THE FUCK BACK HOME! Turn around and just go back to where you came from... please. There's just not enough job expansion in this town for all of us.

To stave off the impending financial doom that I've found myself facing, I took a go-nowhere temp job the day that I walked out of the bank while sobbing (see Tina Fey story). It's a filing job. That's it. Not answering phones. Not entering data into a computer. Just filing. For the same pay that I was making when I temped back in 90-91 before I ever went to any college... and it's equal to what teenagers are getting at McDonalds (that ain't a joke). The first temp job I ever had was went I was 19 and it was also a miserable filing gig... I quit after the first week... like I was tempted to do this time. It's a group temp project (16 total) and none of us are allowed to talk the whole time. I was reprimanded the other day when three of us were told to, "Save the talking for your breaks." And there's no headphones allowed either. Just the silent shuffling of papers and the quiet deadening of our souls.

So we sit all day, day after day, sorting, alphabetizing, and filing the payroll records and job reviews (but we're not allowed to read them) for the local school system (the largest in the state of GA) and there's about 3 years worth of unfiled material for some reason. It seems unending. No one smiles... occasionally we forget our own names... on breaks, we all sit zombified and looking like we've come from the pit of despair... in the mornings, we each dread returning. Several have just simply not shown up again, but were immediately replaced by unwitting fresh faces ready for the soul-sucking operation.

I'd worked there for several shifts before it occurred to me that I should probably try to at least be part of some sort of conversations on those 15 minutes of breakroom bliss. The funny thing turned out to be that I'm not the only over-qualified, over-educated, under-used smarypants in the bunch. One of the guys in the group who has seemed like a kindered spirit from day one turns out to have his whole Juris Doctor degree complete... just waiting to pass the bar and can't get any law firm to hire him until then, and can't get a university to hire him without Ph.D. instead.

And then there's the girl who is filing along side me in a narrow little tomb turns out to be a fucking rocket scientist. Last summer she interned at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Cali. No shit. And apparently she was in the process of finishing her degree in Louisianna when Katrina interrupted. Now she has to wait until the next semester to get into a school here to finish up... and in the meantime, she's over-qualified for some jobs, and under-qualified on the degree side. So here the 3 of us sit in existential limbo... purgatory... too smart for our own good... too good for the only kind of job who'll have us: temping.

On the bright side, the job is only temporary. It's got to end sometime. And it's only a 3 minute drive from my house, so I don't have to face any of the shittiest traffic on record and I can come home for lunch to check my email. So there's that. And it's still not as bad as as the Del Taco job I had when I was 16. Still, the daily intimacy that I've had with papercuts and their sheer variety has led me to fantasize in those mute hours about the multitude of ways that I could kill my supervisor with merely the thin edge of a page and perhaps a well-crafted and well-placed paperclip shiv.

It also reminds me of the brilliance of Cindy Sherman.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Yeah. A Bit.

So I was at the bank today, talking to the guy working at the info desk about my account issues, when right in the middle of what I'm saying to him, he stops me and says "Does anyone ever tell you that you look like someone? Because you remind me so much of that really funny chick who does the news on Saturday Night Live."

"Tina Fey," I say, nodding.

"Yeah, her! She's hilarious. You must get that a lot."

"Yeah. A bit."

The odd part was that I was sobbing at the time (as I usually am at the bank), pleading for him to have mercy on my soul, and apparently it was then that the guy was reminded of the hilarity of SNL.

"A new poll shows that 66 percent of Americans think President Bush is doing a poor job of handling the war in Iraq. And the remaining 34 percent think Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church." --TF, SNL, 10.29.05

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

What Did I Eat for Lunch Today?

How nice of you to ask!

1 can of Norwegian sardines in olive oil

1 bowl of banana bread flavored oatmeal

2 large tutti-fruity flavored marshmallows

5 large gulps of blueberry-pomegranate juice


Why am I bringing this up?

Because every time I burp,

which I'm doing a lot of,

I'm reminded of the combo.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Owattador Kiyam

Okay, so some of my blogger friends were posting this a while ago and I'm just now getting around to reading it... been a bit distracted. The subject of their blogging was: the Science Fiction Film Canon, based on the reviews of a guy named John Scalzi. Apparently he's been a film reviewer for the last 15 years and he wrote a book called The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies. This, in his opinion, is THE canon... or in his description of these titles: "the 50 science fiction films you have to see before you die."

My friends decided to mark the titles they had already seen with bold fonts and leave the ones they hadn't seen in plain italics. I've followed suit and these are my results:

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!
Akira
Alien
Aliens
Alphaville
Back to the Future
Blade Runner
Brazil
Bride of Frankenstein
Brother From Another Planet
A Clockwork Orange
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Contact
The Damned
Destination Moon
The Day The Earth Stood Still
Delicatessen
Escape From New York
ET: The Extraterrestrial
Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial)
The Fly (1985 version)
Forbidden Planet
Ghost in the Shell
Gojira/Godzilla
The Incredibles
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
Jurassic Park
Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior
The Matrix
Metropolis
On the Beach
Planet of the Apes (1968 version)
Robocop
Sleeper
Solaris (1972 version)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
The Stepford Wives
Superman
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
The Thing From Another World
Things to Come
Tron
12 Monkeys
28 Days Later
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
2001: A Space Odyssey
La Voyage Dans la Lune
War of the Worlds (1953 version)

Are you seeing what I'm seeing? If you are, then you'd be looking at the movie watching habits of a woman who may very well have never had sex in her nearly 35 years of life. EVER. In fact, if I didn't have the 3 kids, I'd be highly suspicious of my own accounts.

That's by no means ALL of the sci-fi flicks that I've seen. Hells no. This list is but the tip of the cyber iceberg. For all I know now, I've really never had sex and have made it all up as a cover for the small androids I've created out of hundreds of latex condoms (tossing the packaging around to look as if I've seen action) and spare Commodore 64 parts that I've been saving over the years. Or maybe I'm just a human version of a tribble. They are born pregnant, after all.

I've said enough. Time to go feed the unicorn. (Is that a new euphemism?)

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Little Known Facts About Me

Not many people realize this, but in the 70s I was abducted by gypsies and forced into a world of slavery and prostitution in the woods of Eastern Europe.


(that's me in front-right)

Tragically, we were attacked by wolves one fateful night. The other girls did not survive, but I recovered fully and a few months later gave birth to healthy triplets.


(that's me in the back)

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