And it seems there continues to be a worldwide surplus of people with really really really bad ideas.
http://gizmodo.com/5030339/eyelid-jewelry-contact-lenses-just-seeing-them-makes-eyes-water
I came into work today thinking that I’d had a bit of a rough weekend, which is to say that it was rougher than usual. I’m the kind of guy that really enjoys the weekend and feels the need to make as much of not being at work as possible at the end of a long week, and last week was a long week. So my kid has a cold and was acting fully two years old for the most part, and I thought he put my wife and I through the ringer a bit.
Well then I came to work and heard about the weekends of two of my co-workers (names will be altered to protect the identities of these poor saps).
Let’s start with Mr. Smythe:
I don’t really have to say much about Mr. Smythe’s weekend, except that he had to endure survive enjoy the singular experience of taking the eleven year old scouts on an overnight campout, including a five-mile hike. As is the case with every scout troop, it seems, one of his scouts is severely smitten by ADD (also known as “The-Kid-Is-Deathly-Hyper syndrome”). So the short version of the story is that HyperBoy is one of those kids who can’t stop running his mouth under any circumstance, and one of the other boys, we’ll call him Gigantor (you all know the kid: the one who at eleven looks like a caveman, the one who’s twice the size of any of the other kids when they stack on each others’ shoulders and who has had to shave twice a day since he was six), well Gigantor is the kind of kid who responds to the constant needling of his peers with, “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. PUNCH!”
So the combination is volatile, to say the least.
As might be expected, at 2:00 in the morning, HyperBoy is screaming and sobbing, and Mr. Smythe comes out of his tent to see what all the ruckus is about.
Hyperboy is sobbing, “He ch-ch-choked me! I c-c-can’t BREATHE!!!”
And Gigantor is red in the face and fuming and muttering, “I warned him. He just wouldn’t shut up.”
And Mr. Smythe is secretly pleased and wants to high-five gigantor, but what kind of message would that send?
And if you thought that was bad, let’s move on to Mr. Crater:
Mr. Crater has a new baby, and this weekend he and his wife were planning to perform a religious ceremony celebrating the birth of said baby. So Mr. Crater had his family coming to stay with him in his cozy house, which has, according to him, a maximum occupancy rating of 9.
So his family shows up on Friday, but the real fun starts on Saturday morning when his cousin calls. Apparently his cousin’s power has gone out, and he needs power to run his computer to do his online finals, so Mr. Crater, being the generous soul that he is, says, “Come on over,” and in pour the cousin and his wife and three kids, who we will call Godzilla, Captain Ramrod, and The Sampler (I’m exaggerating here, as Mr. Crater did not actually specify which kid was which in his telling of this tale. It seems that in his mind the kids were a collective, multi-headed act of destruction, sort of like the Hydra).
So the house is getting very crowded and very, very…how can we put this delicately…active, we’ll say. So the cousin gets his computer up, but it keeps re-booting on startup. So what does he suggest? “Hey, can I take apart your computer and hook my hard drive to it to see if I can get to my finals?” That sounds like a genius notion if ever I’ve heard one, but Mr. Crater, being already primed to explode, agrees to this because at this point he is going insane from the crowd and the hydra running about completely unsupervised, destroying his newly purchased home.
What can you imagine that would make this situation even better? The air conditioner dies. The temperature in the house spikes immediately to 92 degrees. So they call for a repairman, and while they’re on the phone with him, somebody opens the fridge and says, “Hey, why is it warm in the fridge?” So now the fridge is dead too, and the same repairman who is supposed to fix the A/C is being sent by the home warranty company, so he’s supposed to look at the fridge and also the microwave, which has its own issues, but the rocket scientist on the phone who’s writing up the ticket doesn’t think to consolidate the issues into one visit, and they charge per visit. So the repair guy shows up with two tickets that are timestamped (and I’m not making this up) three minutes apart, each of which incurs a separate service charge.
Well to top things off, the next day when the actual religious ceremony is to be held at the house, 20 more people show up than were planned, and there are a total of 12 chairs. The A/C is working again, but struggling to keep up, so the house is still uncomfortably warm, and it’s standing room only with a total of 50 people, who all, for unknown reasons, decide the best place to congregate is the kitchen.
In the meantime, Godzilla is running around pushing over the 12 chairs, Captain Ramrod is sitting on the coffee table and launching himself off backwards onto his head on the floor, and The Sampler is picking up pieces of watermelon, taking a bite, then putting them back so he can move on to another piece of watermelon, of which he takes a bite, then puts it back. Some conscientious cousin from the other side of the family sees this and asks the child the question that everybody in the house has been wondering all weekend, “Where are your parents?” To which the child’s mother responds by turning around to see what he is doing from her vantage point of two feet away with her back turned. By this time The Sampler has already moved on to opening the coolers that are holding the contents of the as-yet-unrepaired refrigerator, pulling out cans of soda, opening them, taking a sip, putting them back, and repeating. Mr. Crater’s dad has gone to pick up the celebration victuals from the nearby grocery store, but they party platters are not ready yet, so he’s running a half an hour behind schedule, and all 50 waiting guests are still standing around the kitchen.
So I want to thank Misters Smythe and Crater, because by comparison, my weekend suddenly feels restful, rejuvenating, and thoroughly satisfying. Thanks for taking one for the team, fellas. Working men everywhere are tipping their hats to the both of you today.
To be honest, I didn’t have a whole lot of interest in seeing Pixar’s latest contribution to the American cinemascape, WALL-E. I remember seeing the first trailers for it and thinking, “boy, I really don’t see how they can make that story very interesting.” But, with family in town for the 4th of July, and being out-voted about what to see (actually there was no vote and I didn’t put up any fight…everyone else just wanted to see it, so I went), I’m happy to report that I couldn’t have been more wrong.
My mood going in wasn’t helped at all by the fact that I had woken early that morning after only four hours of sleep to play a golf with MightyThor, which proved to be a waste of several good hours that could have been used for sleep. I played like an idiot and was happy to get it behind me. I tried to catch a nap before heading out to the movie, but by the time I had settled into a deep and restorative slumber, it was time to go. Needless to say, I was pretty cranky waking up.
The moodiness wore off soon enough, aided by the animated short that preceded the feature. The short had the simplest of premises: a magician attempting that age-old magician’s staple of pulling a rabbit out of his hat. Simple and–thanks to Pixar’s amazing knack for character creation, artistic rendering, and brilliantly observed idiosyncrasies–hilarious. I won’t go into details of the hijinx that ensues as the magician tries to force his rabbit to perform, but suffice it to say, it’s a gem well worth arriving at the theater on time to catch.
A few minutes of rich belly laughs and my mood was lightened tremendously, so as the curtain rose on the feature (figuratively speaking), I was ready to be entertained, although still a little unsure of what to expect.
What followed was nothing short of brilliance as the stage–a wasted, refuse ridden version of some future Earth–was set. WALL-E is a small compactor robot who was left behind as the human race made its exodus from the no-longer viable Earth into giant spaceships until the planet can be reclaimed. His directive is simple: clean the place up. So he spends his days zipping around the planet, between the towers of garbage that have taken on the appearance of a metropolitan city scape (amazingly rendered by Pixar), picking up trash and stuffing it inside his internal compactor. When full, he crushes the garbage into cubes, spits them back out and stacks them on the next skyscraper pile.
For the first twenty or so minutes of the film, there is literally no dialog. WALL-E is alone, and though he is a robot, he has developed a penchant for collecting certain elements of human memorabilia that he finds interesting for one reason or another. One such collected artifact is a tape of My Fair Lady that WALL-E watches at night when his day’s work is complete.
One of the big surprises of the movie is an unexpectedly sweet love story. Once the scene on Earth is adequately set, a probe from the humans is sent back to Earth to search for signs of change in the atmosphere that might make Earth inhabitable again. This probe–a much more futuristic and elegant looking robot that flies and boasts some pretty wicked weaponry–is of decidedly female persona, and at one glance, WALL-E falls in love.
The rest of the movie follows WALL-E’s adventure as he follows this robot, aptly named EVE, back into space after he gives her a living plant that he has found in his digging. The discovery of the plant activates EVE’s prime directive–proof of viable living conditions on Earth–and summons the ship that brought her to come pick her up and take her back to the larger human space civilization. WALL-E, unbeknownst to EVE, tags along.
I’ll leave the narrative there and leave the enjoyment of the rest of the picture up to you. I’ll only say this much more: WALL-E surprised me in nearly every way. It’s visually stunning, heart warming, and of course, hilarious. And as much as I was afraid it would, WALL-E’s warning message about the degradation of humanity and its effect on the planet (or vice versa if you prefer) doesn’t feel preachy or condescending. In fact, it’s quite effective in its understated packaging, much more so than it would have been were it a more threatening and overt condemnation of man’s gluttonous consumerism.
All things considered, I have no hesitation about designating WALL-E as the best movie of the year, by a long shot. It’s a must-see and if possible, it’s a must-see on the big screen. And there really is so much to see.
Overall Rating: Must See! or Four Stars, or Thumb’s Up, or I Grok, or whatever floats your boat as far as ratings go. Just see the movie.
The only question is whether I need five bullets for them, or just one for myself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25qiZy7vmqY
Here are my thoughts, in no particular order:
Hannahmontanarrific (adj): (Contributed by Donjuanica)
Being possessed of the peculiar quality which causes inexplicable frenzy among seven to twelve year old girls, to the befuddlement of rational adults who, as a consequence, shell out hundreds of dollars on eBay to claim sold-out event tickets, without ever knowing why.
Example Usage:
“The Stadium of Fire was hannahmontanarrific!”
Related Words:
Jonasbrothersome, Hillaryduffenomenal, Highschoolmusicaligious
Antonyms:
Breastakaboobical, chestakamammical, pendular globular, tubular boobular joy
(Note: Give it a few years and these might become more applicable, if Miley Cyrus follows the dubious path laid out before her by some of her predecessors.)
I was watching “I Survived A Japanese Gameshow” last night during a serious thunderstorm that passed over Raleigh. Never ones to shy away from a chance to use on-screen advertisements, the crack team at ABC 11 was right there with important updates which crawled incessantly across the bottom of the screen enclosed by their not-so-understated ABC 11 Accuweather Alert graphic, which of course obscured all of the English subtitles of the show.
It took me a minute, however, to realize what sage advice they were able to put together on such short notice. Observe:
The full text of the message (regarding a flash flood warning) was this:
“If flood conditions are encountered, be prepared to seek higher ground. If traveling remember turn around, don’t drown.”
You can imagine my relief to see this critical piece of information scrolling repeatedly across my TV for several hours. Thank goodness I wasn’t traveling! My first instinct would have certainly been to drown myself! Thank you ABC 11 Accuweather Alert!
In terms of auditory torture, we Americans clearly have to step up our game. Look at what the Germans have come up with: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2008/07/06/cage-slow-organ.html. The threshold of boredom in church has just been taking to daring new heights, my friends.
And this is what you get when a Canadian director pairs up with Placido Domingo and Howard Shore to put on a new opera in France: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/theatre/story/2008/07/03/f-cronenberg-fly-opera.html.
I’ll be the first in line to buy the first car these guys make.
Crumbnut (noun): I could provide a definition, but it would rob you of the unique opportunity to use this word as you see fit. I will say that this is the best product name I’ve seen in a while. Behold:
- Contributed by Smith’s Marketplace, Bakery Division
Assuming I’ve done my math correctly (which is by no means a safe assumption, based on my previous experience with maths), yesterday was the collective birthday of the four minds here at the Word. I wrote a complex algorithm to arrive at this date, which involved taking the first and last of the birthdays of the four minds and then counting the days between them and dividing that number in half. I also could have taken an average of the actual numeric placement of the four birthdays in the 365.25 day calendar year to come up with a more accurate central birthday, but even describing that calculation makes my brain hurt.
So happy birthday to Donjuanica, MrHattyHat, MightyThor, and Atticusser on June 20th, 25th, 28th, and July 22nd respectively. To celebrate the momentous occasion, there will be cake* in the breakroom.
*The cake is a lie.
