This is a very trivial thing but I can’t stand it when I look at peoples Ipods and it looks something like this:

AC/DC

acdc

Basement Jaxx

Beatsie Boys

Beastie Boys

the Beastie Boys

…and so on

It really doesn’t take that much to change the names of the artists in itunes so that you don’t have three or four different folders for the same artist.  I personally want all my Nine Inch Nails music to be easily found under Nine Inch Nails.  No search through different iterations of the name to find out which album is under which spelling of the band name.  It makes everything look so much better and it shows that you took that little extra time and effort.

Mind you sometimes I have to wonder why I do this.  I am in the process of fixing my itunes library (My computer crashed so I lost everything.  Luckily I found a way to copy the 40gigs of music from my ipod back to my computer and accidentally made itunes save the music again with the original titles.)  Right now I am going through KMFDM and they have around 40 cd’s (including singles not including some rare and unreleased tracks I managed to find) and it is a bit daunting to make sure all the tracks are in the right album folder and that they are all labeled as KMFDM as the artist,  but I’m going to truck along and in the end my Ipod play list will be nice and neat.

I’m probably the only one who actually cares about this.   I’ve only seen a few other peoples Ipods but none of them were all that neat (I’m looking at you Paul and Jason).

I was recently reminded the other day that I have a blog.  I haven’t posted anything here in a long time and when I realised that I also realised that I really don’t have anything new really to say.  Unless I can think of some sort of theme that keeps my interest longer than a week then maybe I will have fodder for this but with the way my brain works it’ll be a miracle if my attention is kept just writing this entry.

I would kind of like to keep writing more here but seeing that in the last few months roughly 2 people have even bothered to see if it’s been updated it is kind of discouraging.  Granted if I wrote more I would have more people stumbling across this blog accidentally artificially boosting my numbers but that all comes back to finding things to write about.

I guess we’ll see how things go now that my interest has been peaked slightly again.  Who knows there might be another post by the end of the day.

So, it’s finally becoming a reality.  NTT Communications has unveiled their latest exploit and it is a smelly cell phone.  That’s right they have developed smell-o-talking.  Not quit as impressive as smell-o-vision but you can guarantee that now that they have developed the smelly cell phone, they are just mere years away from smell-o-vision.  Of course it’s a Japanese company that developed this, those wacky Japanese, what will they not think of doing.  I think that they developed this cell phone because most Japanese people don’t have dogs (because of limited space) so they just needed something to blame their farts on.

“It wasn’t me, it was my cell phone!”

Hi Alfred.

    The other night I watched most of the AFI top 100 movies (10th anniversary).  I’ve decided to take it upon myself to watch all the movies on the list.  Between downloading, watching the few movies that I own that are on the list, and borrowing movies from others, I think I should be able to watch most of them.  The biggest problem will be finding some of  older movies, although seeing as they are apparently the best American movies the ones I won’t be able to find online, the video store should have them in stock.

I’m going to start at 100 and work my way up.  I’ve already downloaded Ben-Hur, now I just need to sit down and watch all 3 and a half hours.  I’ll try to post about most, if not all, of the movie that I watch.

New Post!!

    I was looking around the net the other day and noticed that someone had taken the casing off of their flash drive and put it inside a lego block.  I thought that this was a really cool idea and thought, hey, I have a flash drive, maybe I could do the same.  I took off the casing and right away noticed that it was way to big to fit into a normal sized lego brick.  I thought about what else would make a cool casing when it hit me.  I have a wack load of Hot Wheels, maybe I could cut one of those up and put the flash drive in there.  I borrowed my brothers Dremel, and went to work.  After about 2 hours of cutting, grinding, and melting this is what I came up with

I went to the store today to buy a new battery for our cordless phone. The battery that came with the phone still worked, it just didn’t hold a charge fore very long. It would last maybe 15-20 minutes before it died, and around 5 minutes before it died it would start beeping and get very annoying. When we first bought the phone a few years ago it would last for a long time before it died. Sometimes having the phone die quickly was a good way to get off the phone with someone you didn’t really feel like talking too, but for the most part it was just frustrating. So I’m at the store looking at the batteries, and the cheapest one I could find was for $23.99. I grabbed it and was ready to go to the check out line to buy it when while walking past the phones on display I noticed they were selling a cordless phone for $20.99. It wasn’t on sale so this was the normal price for it. I figured it was worth a shot so I grabbed the box and opened it up to see if the battery would fit in my existing phone. To my surprise it did. The battery selling for $23.99 did have a big label boasting the extended talk time, but really we don’t need that. So tell me this. How can they sell a phone with all the cables and the charging dock along with a battery for $3 less than if you just buy the battery. For that matter, why can’t you just buy a cheap standard battery for around $10 rather than forcing people to spend more for extra battery life. It’s just one of those mysteries that can’t really be answered, like why hotdogs are packaged in 10s and hotdogs buns are packaged in 12.

Walking through the store the other day I noticed a movie called The Monster Squad on the rack and I just had to get it. The weird thing was that it was only a few weeks earlier I was thinking of this movie and was wanting to see it again. I figured that it must be a sign that I was meant to have this movie. That and the fact that it was a 2 disc special edition with commentaries and a whole bunch of extras with the low price of $12.99 led me to purchase the movie. While driving home I started to think about it and I could only remember watching this movie once when I was little, and I didn’t remember the details all that much. The only thing I really remembered was that it was a bunch of kids fighting a group of classic monsters, and that I thought it wasn’t that bad. That and there was a scene where one of the kids smelts silver and forms silver bullets in shop class.

The whole story for the movie is 100 years ago Van Helsing and his group tried to rid the world of evil monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Mummy, and The Gill Man) but failed. There is a special amulet that if a virgin recites some scripts then it will open a portal into an abyss that will suck all evil into it. If Dracula, on the other hand, gets possession of said amulet then you can bet it’s game over for everyone. In the present time (1987) The amulet some how makes it to middle america and Dracula resurfaces and recruits the monsters to help him retrieve it. But it’s not as easy as he thought it would be, because you see, there is a group of 12 year old boys who happen to have a club dedicated to monsters and they see the signs that the monsters are in town when no one else will. They stumble upon Van Helsings diary and discover that it is up to them to stop Dracula from retrieving the amulet and taking over the world.

I got home and popped the movie into the DVD player, not really expecting much out of it, but at the same time hoping that my memories did not betray me into watching another crap fest that hadn’t aged well. Pretty much from the start the movie was good. It started by telling a little back story and at first it was just text on the screen, not even a voice over, but then it faded into an actual back story which to me tells me that the director wanted you to get into the movie. There was another movie that I watched that only had the text back story and right from that point I was not as interested in the movie as I could have been. If that director had taken a few extra days and added a little five minute prologue video it would have changed at least some aspects of the movie for me. Anyway, pretty much right from the beginning I was reminded of another classic from my childhood, The Goonies. It was cool to see the classic monsters as they should be. You can guarantee that if this movie had been made today they would have “updated” the monsters and thus ruining them. Seeing the wolfman in a torn up white shirt and blue jeans, or the Mummy as just that, a mummy, or even Frankenstein’s Monster as a big hulking man-child with stitching all over the place is just great. I just would not want to see them portrayed as anything else, especially in a movie like this. Oh Yeah, there was a fish guy too.

The writing was for the most part really good. It did have a certain ’80’s feel to it at some points, but I found myself drawn into the story telling, and was actually laughing out loud at some lines. A few of my favourites are:

“Wolfmans got nards!“

“My name is Horace!(shotgun pumping)“

But along with those great one liners, there are it’s fair share of crappy lines that are all too familiar with the 1980’s, such as:

“See you later, Band-Aid breath“

The monsters are pretty cool and they all have their big scene, well except for The Gill man or Creature as he is also called. He gets the Boba Fett award in this movie. Basically The Gill man looks really cool, and you assume he can do cool things, but when he is on screen he basically does nothing. He is also very easily taken care of with a shotgun blast to the chest. The mummy has a cool looney tunes death scene where he is on the back of a truck and they tie one of his loose threads to an arrow and shoot it into a tree. The result of this is him being unraveled and it actually looks pretty cool when this happens. Come to think of it the Mummy didn’t really do anything either so I think he should get the Boba Fett award as well. The coolest though is Wolfman. There is one scene where he gets a stick of dynamite shoved down his pants and is pushed out of a second story window. The dynamite explodes while he is still in the air and wolf bits go everywhere. A few scenes later it shows his arm and it twitches, then his leg also twitches, then his eyes open and his upper body moves. The pieces then all get sucked back together and he is as good as new. Dracula was played really well also. It was nice because the only thing he really cared about was getting that amulet and didn’t care who he had to kill to get it. There were a few points where you sat there and almost forgot that this was actually geared towards a younger audience.

There were a few parts of the movie where you just sit there shaking your head wondering what they were thinking when they filmed that. But by far the worst part of the movie was at the end when they open the portal and evil is getting sucked into it. Dracula is fighting with the main kid, when Van Helsing, who was sucked into the portal at the beginning, jumps out of the portal, grabs Dracula to be sucked into the abyss. While they are flying backwards, Van Helsing looks at the hero, smiles and gives a big thumbs up. The kid looks back and in turn give his own thumbs up.

Van Helsing thumbs up

All in all I really enjoyed this movie and will probably be watching it again. I’ll still pop in The Goonies, or catch it on T.V. if I see it. I’ll leave you now with the The Monster Squad end credits theme. Enjoy, mwahahahaha.

p.s. while looking for sound clips and such to put in this review I stumbled across this gem. I thought it was funny, but the delivery wasn’t the greatest so I redid it into a straight video and put it on Youtube.

When did drunk driving become funny. I’ve noticed in the last year or two that both T.V. and movies have used people driving while hammered as humour. Most notably are Family Guy, which has used this in numerous occasions, The 40 year old virgin, where the main character gets a ride with a very drunk girl, and just recently, Superbad, where it’s the cops that are drunk.

Why is this accepted? Especially in the 40 year old virgin, where the drunk girl has a court ordered breathealizer installed on her car, indicating that she has been previously convicted of driving under the influence. In that scene she drives all over the city, smashing into many cars, before finally turning into one and totalling her PT Cruiser. In Family Guy it happens so often there really isn’t much to say about it. In Superbad the police are driving around drunk. There is even a scene where they are stopped and blowing into the breathalizer to see how drunk they are. There was even a memorable instance in the simpsons where Homer and his buddies get drunk and drive through the elementary school, totally trashing it. The kids are blamed for wrecking the school and a curfew is put into place.

To top off these movie and T.V. show occurrences you have all thee celebrities driving while intoxicated and nothing ever seems to come of it. What ever happened to Mel Gibsons drunk driving charge. It seems like he spouted off some anti-semitic remarks, and called a female officer “sugar tits”, and that became the big story. All the young starlets are totally getting away with this crap and it really needs to stop. Nicole Richie got sentenced to 4 days in prison, of which she only spent 84 minutes! I’m sure she will never re-offend after doing that hard time. Lindsay Lohan apparently got sentenced to 1 day, so by my calculations, the state actually owes her time. I really don’t know what the laws are in California, but you would think that if someone is driving drunk, they should get punished. If you are caught driving drunk you should automatically have your car impounded, and have your license suspended for at least a month, and that’s only if i’s your first offence. The punishment should get more severe if you are a repeat offender.

These shows and movies need to own up to the fact that they are setting a bad example. Coming from me that really says alot because I don’t really believe all the hype of violence in movies leading to violence in real life. I mean recently Disney announced they are banning smoking from all of their movies. That’s right, no character in any Disney movie from now on is allowed to smoke on screen, because they don’t want to give young people the idea that smoking is cool. I’ll but money on the fact that in the future in some other movie that they finance there will be someone driving drunk with hilarious outcomes. The fact is they are using a very serious offence where anybody could very easily be killed and using it to get a cheap laugh. How funny would it have been in the 40 year old virgin when she turns straight into the other car ad crashes, she does her little thing and throws up on Steve Carrell, and then it pans to the other car, where the mother is crying because her baby who was sitting in the back seat took the brunt of the collision and was not unconcious and not breathing.

I really don’t know what’s more disturbing, the fact that this is happening in movies and no one seems to be batting an eye, or that fact that I find myself chuckling when I see it.