Primarily Crap

This battle to get Anna Nicole’s body buried is really getting ridiculous.

I’ve said this many times to many people, but now I’m going to write it down. I’m not sure how official a blog is, but if I’m gone at least this will be here in case there’s some sort of battle over what to do with my body.

First of all, take anything useful from it and donate it to medicine. If there’s anything left after that, and with all the crap that’s going on with me, I’m sure they’ll be plenty that they won’t want, do not bury or entomb it. I’m a firm believer that the dead are taking up too much space on this earth and I don’t want to be contributing to that.

Other than that, I don’t give a flying fuck what you do with it, I’m done with it and I don’t need it anymore. You can burn it and let the ashes blow away in the wind, or keep them in an urn on your mantelpiece if you so desire (although, personally I think that’s kind of creepy), or if it’s easier, you can leave it in the dumpster behind the convenience store down the street from my house.

Yesterday I took Kyla to see this movie, and I walked out of the theatre with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

My advice to anyone who is planning on seeing this movie is, “DON’T”, at least not if you’re expecting to see another version of “The Chronicles of Narnia”. If you are not planning on heeding my advice, then I warn you not to read any further until after you have seen it, but I highly recommend that you take my advice and read what I’m about to say.

***SPOILERS***

I did not know much about this movie going in, only what I had seen from the trailer, and from that, I was under the impression that it was going to be another “Narnia” type movie where a couple of kids find their way into a fantasy land and have an adventure.

Why did I think this? Because that’s how it was being promoted. Turns out, that not only is this not what the movie is about, but apparently even the filmmakers were unhappy with the advertising campaign being misleading.

This movie is not about a couple of kids who find a fantasy land outside their back door and have an adventure, instead it is about a couple of kids who imagine a fantasy land outside their back door and pretend to have an adventure. That’s right, the place isn’t real, it’s all in their imagination.

The thing is, this isn’t even what I have the problem with. It was definitely a big letdown to me because I was mislead into believing that I was going to see a movie about one thing and in fact it was something else entirely, but I was actually willing to forgive this, and might have been able to enjoy the movie for what it actually was, if it weren’t for one other fact, the girl dies. That’s right, the cute little girl with the infectious smile and overactive imagination is killed about 2/3’s of the way into the movie, and the movie then shifts from being a movie about 2 kids and how they deal with the problems of normal life by making up a fantasy play land, to one kid learning how to grieve over another kids death, and then learning how to be a better person by learning from the life that she lived and by keeping her memory alive.

The movie is supposed to end on an inspiring note as the other kid does indeed keep her memory alive and brings his little sister into the fold, and the two of them continue to play in the imaginary land of Terabithia, but I did not feel good at the end of this movie.

To me it was gut-wrenching and as I have already stated, I walked out of the theatre with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and a haunting emptiness that lasted all day.

Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know, but with all of the terrible things that go on in this world today, I don’t want to see a movie that involves the tragic death of a10 year old girl. That’s not my type of entertainment. Or at the very least, I want to know going into it that this is not going to be the feel good movie it is being portrayed as.

Hey don’t get me wrong, I love stories that have shocking twists to them, in fact they are probably my favorite types of stories, and a lot of times the best ones are the ones where you’re not expecting anything shocking to happen.

But this is a kid’s story, and I don’t expect to see something like this happen in one of those stories, at least not in a story that I am assuming is safe to bring my 6 year old daughter to.

Sure Kyla’s seen death in movies before. She’s seen and loves all of the Harry Potter movies, The Chronicles of Narnia, Charlotte’s Web, and others, but none of the deaths in any of those movies had the same affect as this one.

The strange thing is, it didn’t seem to bother Kyla at all. As soon as we got out of the theatre she did what she always does after we see a movie and said, “Can we get the DVD?” When Penny asked her if she felt sad, she said no, and we didn’t really pursue it after that, so it doesn’t seem to have affected her at all; which is fine, but it sure had an affect on me.

Finally I want to say that I know that there are probably a lot of people out there who read this book and are going to defend both the book and the film by saying that the book is a masterpiece of great writing and study of human emotion and the film stayed true to it. And that I should be looking at this story for what it is and not what I was led to believe it was going to be.

That’s your opinion and you’re entitled to it. And maybe it is a great study of human emotion, but I don’t care, because I did not go to the theatre to see that kind of movie, I went to see a fantasy movie, and I came out of the theatre feeling about as depressed as I ever had in my life.

What is the deal with the “man in the yellow hat” from Curious George? He seems kind of creepy to me. This guy lives in the city, yet he’s always dressed in a safari outfit, and not just a safari outfit but a bright yellow safari outfit.

He doesn’t seem to have any friends, except for a baby monkey that he seems to have stolen out of the wild and is now keeping illegally while trying to pass him off as a child, and strangely enough, he seems to be successful at it. He uses the monkey as a personal slave and who knows what else he’s doing with it. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.

What I do know is that this is the type of character that I would not let anywhere near my daughter.

In an attempt to expand my limited vocabulary, I have signed up for the email word of the day on dictionary.com.
I probably won’t remember 90% of what I learn, but I figure if they just keep throwing it at me, some of it might stick.

Today’s word is:

sonorous \suh-NOR-uhs; SAH-nuh-rus\, adjective:

1. Giving sound when struck; resonant; as, sonorous metals.

2. Loud-sounding; giving a clear or loud sound; as, a sonorous voice.

3. Yielding sound; characterized by sound; as, the vowels are sonorous.

4. Impressive in sound; high-sounding.

I will now attempt to use it in a sentence.

All were silent as they listened to the sonorous voice of Patrick Henry complete the speech that would make history with the famous words, “give me liberty, or give me death”.

There’s a sign above the sink in the cafeteria of my office building that says, “please do not throw food in the sink, as it will cause the sink to clog.” I’m not annoyed by the sign itself, but I am annoyed by the fact that there are people in this world who are ignorant enough to cause a sign like that to be put up.

There are many signs in the month of February that spring is on its way. It starts with Ground Hog Day early in the month. As the month progresses, the days grow longer, for me that means no longer driving to work in the dark.

Also for me, and many other Sox fans, there is the day the equipment truck leaves for Florida, followed a few days later by pitchers and catchers reporting to Spring Training (I think even most non-baseball fans know what it means when they hear the term “pitchers and catchers”.

And for me, here’s another one:

6 baseball articles in the Boston Sunday Globe.

I like to check the stat tracker on my blog once in a while to see who visited it and what brought them here. One of the items I can check is what key word searches were used to find my blog.

One of the more recent ones was “shrink ray breasts”. On the Google search result page, my blog was the 3rd one down. I mentioned the phrase “shrink ray” in one entry and the word breasts in a completely different entry (probably more than one). I also noticed that on the first page of the search results, all 10 web sites were similar in that the words shrink ray and breasts are mentioned separately.

It has me wondering, just what was this person looking for when he decided to Google the phrase “shrink ray breasts”?

Also, if I was going to have a pair of breasts that I could use as a weapon, I think that I would rather have a pair that shot a death ray, or at least a stun ray. Of course, X-ray breasts would be a hell of a lot of fun too.

Variety may be the spice of life, but too much spice can cause indigestion.

Over the past year and some change, since I’ve had my iPod, my music collection has grown significantly; I currently have close to 7,000 songs on it. In general, as has been mentioned here before, I like to just let it play randomly, so I never know what’s going to come up next.

In theory it would be like having my own personal radio station tailored just for me, with no DJ’s talking over the music and no commercials, just song after song of music I like and want to hear.

Recently, I have discovered a hole in this theory, that being that songs keep popping up on my iPod that I don’t actually like. You wonder; how can that be? It’s my iPod, why would I put songs on it that I don’t like.

Well, the answer is very simple; and pretty obvious once you hear it explained. You see, I’ve been collecting music now for over 25 years, starting with vinyl albums and cassette tapes and moving on to CD’s. Back then, when I bought one of the above, I pretty much put it into my player and let it play.

If there was a song that I really despised, I would just skip over it, but for the most part I just listened to the entire album, and songs that I wasn’t sure of eventually just grew on me.

I think that there were 2 main reasons for this:

1. I liked the artist so I gave everything a chance.
2. Like most people, I want variety. I get bored hearing the same stuff over and over again, and back then, there wasn’t as much music so there weren’t as many options, and it wasn’t as easy to acquire all of those options as it is now.

So, I bought what I could afford to buy and continued to listen to it a lot. As the collection grew, so did the variety, but it never seemed to get to a point where I had so many options that I didn’t want to hear things that I was listening to. That is, until now.

Without getting into all of the math, I estimate that with the amount of time I spend listening to my iPod, and the amount of music I have on it, I am only going to hear each song about 3-4 times per year. Back when I was a teenager, I was hearing the same songs 3-4 times per week, and even more with the popular songs that were being played on the radio. It was to a point where I knew almost every word to almost every song I listened to and not only knew what album it was from, but what position it was at on the album.

With the amount of music I have now (and growing), I don’t ever expect to become that familiar with the new music I add, but I would still like to get to a point where, when I hear the song, I know the name of it and who’s doing it. At the rate I’m going now, that may never happen; which brings me back to the topic of songs coming up on my iPod that I don’t like. You see, I have music on my iPod that I have been listening to for years, even decades for some of it. These are songs that I was listening to back when I wanted as much variety as possible but did not have as much as I wanted.

And now that I do have that variety, these are also songs that I am realizing I no longer like, or quite possibly, never even really liked to begin with. Now that I have thousands of songs on my iPod that I’ve only heard a handful of times, and will only hear another handful of times in each coming year, I no longer have (or more accurately want to spend the) time to listen to the familiar songs of my youth that I probably never really liked to begin with, but only listened to because they were there, and as these songs come up on my iPod I am deleting them.

So, as I continue to expand my music collection and to say hello to all of the new and exciting options that are out there, sadly, at the same time I am saying goodbye to many old familiar friends that have been with me for up to 2/3 of my lifetime, but will now be removed from my life forever.

I understand that there’s a major nor’easter going on out there right now and that you need to drive a little differently during storms like this.

But there’s a difference between the “being cautious” kind of driving and the “stay the fuck home because you have no fucking clue how to drive in this kind of weather, or better yet, move to Florida” kind of driving.

This morning Mitt Romney made his announcement that he will run for President. I saw a clip from an excerpt of his speech in which he stated the following:

“I believe in God and I believe that every person in this great country, and every person on this grand planet, is a child of God. We are all sisters and brothers.

“I believe in America!

As I was watching this, I half expected him to end it by saying “goodnight” and turning around and walking off the stage as the camera panned to Susan Sarandon breathlessly sighing, “oh my”, as was the scene in Bull Durham after Crash Davis made this speech:

“I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hangin’ curve ball, high fiber, good scotch; that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap.

Goodnight.