This simple wisdom found me on the inkernets today.

“She told me we couldn’t afford beer anymore.

Then I found out she spent $65 on makeup.

I asked why I had to give up stuff and she didn’t.

She said she needed the makeup to look pretty for me.

I told her that’s what the beer was for.

I don’t think she’s coming back.”

It’s always fun to see reality trump philosophy.

You can’t buy happiness, but you can pay to have the people who irritate you whacked.

OBTW, apparently a bunch of people in the movie business got together last night to take turns stroking each other’s egos. But I was too busy watching Dirty Jobs and Dogfights to care.

Alexander, staring Colin Farrell, and Troy, staring Brad Pit, both came out the same summer. That summer, the critics called one of them a pretty good war movie that took license with history and the other one a historically accurate, long, boring, sex-charged waste of time. The other night, renting from the DVD kiosk at the grocery store, I struggled to remember which was which. In the end, “He chose… poorly.”*

I need to preface this with some history. In ancient Greece, sex was … uninhibited. There were whole temples in which one could “pay tribute” to a particular god by having sex with a temple prostitute. Was Alexander the Great gay? No, but only because “gay” wasn’t really invented yet. He was just Greek. (Maybe that would make a better euphemism for our modern culture’s sexual switch hitters.)

If you’ve read my blog at all, you’ve probably figured out, I’m not a big fan of mixing your pipe fittings**. Still I think it’s worth mentioning that Oliver Stone surprised me with how he handled Alexander batting from both sides of the plate. Alexander’s “lover” spends the whole movie making fawning glances and syrupy comments about his feelings and, as Roger Ebert put it, “…the rest of the time, they hug a lot.” Meanwhile, on Alexander’s wedding night (with the only female love interest in the movie), Stone offers a scene befitting those channels you have to pay to watch. Again, I’ll go with Ebert’s description: “[It] ends with them engaged in the kind of unbridled passion where you hope nobody gets hurt.”

In between scenes of weird sexual tension, there was, apparently, a war moving going on. There were a couple of big battle scenes that are frankly confusing. I knew there was supposed to be some masterful battlefield tactics going on, but I never figured out what. Heavy use of blowing dirt and shaking cameras eliminated the need to actually do anything clever on the screen. Instead we see a lot of Farrell yelling and a fair amount of millisecond blood squirt clips.

The rest of the movie (and believe me, there’s a *lot* of the rest of the movie) was filled with gruelingly long speeches and philosophical arguments. Imagine a two hour long debate over whether the toilet paper should roll frontwards or backwards, but with more yelling.

Just about every element of the movie bothered me. It seemed that Oliver Stone tried to use the make up department to help the viewer know who was who. For instance, I’ll bet you didn’t know that Persian men wear thick eye liner *all the time* including during battle. Likewise, if you are a Greek soldier, you must have at least two gruesome scars on your face.

Accents in American films always bug me, but this one was just silly. The Greeks had either the standard Hollywood bad British accent or a thick Scottish/Irish accent. (Seriously, one of the guys from Braveheart is in this movie and sounds the same.) Then, Angelina Jolie’s character sounds kind of Turkish or maybe Middle Eastern. Seriously, I don’t think anyone in history ever had an accent like that.

Sorry to get all long winded on a review of a movie I didn’t like. There was just so much to not like about it. In the end, I want my two dollars back.

* Movie reference! Can you be the first to comment with it’s source and the character who spoke it?

** NOT a movie reference, but rather a sexual metaphor using pluming terms. Please DON’t be the first to comment on what you think it means.

I hold very strongly to the opinion that “Entertainment News” is the biggest oxymoron in America. I detest tabloid society and deplore the people whose money keeps it afloat. If it were not for the vacuous multitudes who fawn over Hollywood stars and drool of every morsel of paparazzi gossip, the entire industry would fade into the septic tank of history where it belongs.

That being said, I’d like to post my first comment on Britney Spears. This weekend, in the span of 48 hours, she checked in to and out of rehab, shaved her head and got two tattoos. (Not that there’s anything wrong with tattoos.) This sounds very much like something that you’d hear about a rebellious sixteen-year-old who’d had another fight with her mom. This sounds very much like something I’d have to deal with in my youth group. But this is not a pubescent tantrum we’re talking about. This is an adult mother of two.

The first time I ever heard the name Britney Spears, it was swirling in the controversy of a jail-bate teenager doing a sexually charged music video when she professed to be a virgin and was touted as a role model for good girls everywhere. It would not have been hard, if I had even the slightest shred of interest at the time, to predict the path this young girl would take.

From Mouseketeer to sex symbol to making out with Madonna to pregnant white-trash to Paris Hilton crotch shot to drug hazed head shaving. It’s all par for the course. It’s terrible to say, but I would be surprised if she survives past 30 and if she does, she will end up one of the many curiosities in the freak show of American pop culture has-beens. There’s a long and illustrious history for people in this gutter of society with names like Howard Hughes, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Michael Jackson, and Anna Nicole Smith. From that list of names you can see that there are two possible outcomes. Early death at the hands of fast living or years of sequestered insanity. Britney’s chances of ending up in one of those two situations is near 100%. 2 to 1 says it’s the former rather than the latter.

Call me a cynic, but I pray for the day when America stops idolizing entertainers. It is the root of all that stinks about our society. Something is terribly wrong in a culture where hundreds of people spend weeks outside a courthouse to show their undying support for a millionaire recluse who spends his days riding roller coasters with a monkey and someone else’s kids and has paid the mortgages of countless plastic surgeons in his futile attempts to become something other than what he is. It’s this same people who wring their hands and wag their heads over a distraught woman acting out in rebellion befitting someone half her age.

I tell you we need to treat these people the same way you treat a wayward four-year-old screaming for attention. If you ignore them, eventually, they’ll stop being so stupid. Thus ends my last ever post on Britney Spears.

Back in January, I set some short term goals for myself. I did… okay. I made it through January without eating donuts, rice or potatoes, but I fell off the wagon big time when it came to soft drinks and candy. My weekly weigh-in showed only minimal results from the first two weeks, when I was staying true. But after I gave it to the temptations, I quickly floated back up to my current (over) weight plateau (250 pounds más o menos).

So now, I must redouble my efforts. And this week’s white board quip might add some motivation through degradation.

You’re not fat! You just look fat because you’re so old.

I don’t remember exactly how I ended up receiving the “What On Earth” catalog for the first time. But I do know that it changed the course of my life. It was choke full of the clothing equivalent of manna from heaven. T-shirts! Funny ones, weird ones, cool ones, t-shirts that would make me stand out from the pubescent junior high crowd. It was like the first time a baby discovers cake frosting. I was all wide-eyed and couldn’t get enough.

Through college, my friend Galyn and I became famous (or infamous) for our eclectic t-shirts. It became, for me, more of a lifestyle than a fashion choice. The “fat ugly hula girls” and the “big spotted hoodoos” were more who we were than what we wore.

Well, lo and behold, the circle of life has come back around. I discovered only a few weeks ago, that the “What On Earth” catalog still exists and they now have a web site. *GLEE* There are literally thousands of shirts on there site, so it will take me a while to go through them all, and I fear that my t-shirt wish list will soon require it’s own dedicated hard drive. So be it. Never again will I struggle with the question, “What do you want for your birthday?” My response will be the following URL: http://www.surelyyourenotserious.com/blog/?page_id=448

Ze wraps on Valentine’s Day.

“We give flowers on Valentine’s Day. That’s a nice metaphor. You know, nature; taking something beautiful, you know, away from where it grew up and watching it slowly whither and eventually die.”

I know it must be hard for you to believe, but I’m not real big on this whole Valentine’s Day thing. In fact, I might have missed it all together if it weren’t for the fact that my wife and I are celebrating a friend’s birthday tonight. Oh, looky there. Haven’s birthday is on V Day.

The way I see it, I love my wife every day all year long. Why would I go out of my way to, at great expense, “prove” that I love her on some arbitrary day established, no doubt, to boost sales of flowers and candy.

Fortunately, my wife is the coolest wife in the whole world. (Sorry, all you married guys, but mine’s better. Deal with it.) She’s not happy about my feelings on V Day, but she’s okay with it.

Jess’s wife has an even more extreme take on the matter which I will let him explain.

Clicky clicky

Addendum:
I should clarify something. The only way any guy can get away with shrugging off V Day is if he showers his wife with love the rest of the year. Honestly, due to my work schedule over the last few months, I have not been pulling my weight in that regard. Sorry, Squirt. I’ll do better, I promise.

Love is in the air, and in my nose.

If you were a booger, I’d pick you first.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

I’m really having a hard time with the idea that it’s already February. Somehow the entire month of January passed in what felt like a week. But, at long last, my life should be returning to normalcy, which in my life is a bit of a misnomer.

I’m still shaking bugs out of the new website, but I’m confident enough in it to send you there. It’s at www.altn.com. I’ll get some screen shots of the old website before we trash it so you can see a comparison. We went from a “way too busy”, “magazine ad” look to a down-right Spartan, “clean and simple” look. And oh-by-the-way, we completely redesigned the back-end, e-commerce architecture and introduced a fully content managed design. Now the marketing guys can reword and rearrange to their hearts’ content without bother the web developers… much.

I am co-directing “The Diaries of Adam and Eve” for Stage Right Productions. It’s a dessert theater performed in reader’s theater style. By “co-directing” I mean that I showed up for auditions, two rehearsals, and that’s about it. Please reference my earlier discussion of the chronology of January. Still, the show is going to be awesome.

The stage will still be warm after dessert theater when we start auditions and rehearsals for the Spring musical. I’ve been too busy to know much about what’s going on there, but rest assured, I’ll be involved somehow.

I can’t express how eager I am get back on my mountain bike and rock wall. I look forward to misplacing my gut, maybe for good this time.

There are so many things I’ve missed over the last three or four months that I’ll never really be able discuss fully here. Apparently there was some election or something and the Democrats are kind of excited about it. Despite the insistence and urging of many, the world has not melted, nor the sky fallen. Several people about whom I really couldn’t care less have publicly announced that rehab will somehow repair their moral bankruptcy and corrupt lifestyles. There are also unconfirmed reports that some vestige of the movie industry still exists in Southern California.

I look forward to getting back in the saddle and entertaining you all, or at least allowing you to peek in on my occasional rants and worthless opinions.