He's back!

One of my favorite columnists at America's Finest News Source has been MIA for the better part of two years, but now Herbert Kornfeld has come roaring back with the latest from Midwest Office Supply:

It Wuz Always 'Bout Tha Numbahs

Sleepless hours and dreamless nights and far aways / Ooo ooo ooo, wishing you were here. —Chicago, "Wishing You Were Here"...

The 4-20 solution

Apparently foreign students in Moscow are being holed up in their dormitories for protection from neo-Nazis and other xenophobic crowds who become violent around Hitler's birthday. Call me crazy, but I like the American version of 4-20 a whole lot better. It's too bad we can't just gather up a shipload of confiscated grass and send it over to Moscow and distribute it on the campuses. Things might calm down just a bit...

Year -0015/0026/0044 begins...now

Year Zero is on sale here in the U.S.A.!  Yay, Trent!
My parents have been married 25 years!  Yay, Mom and Dad!
The man behind Puscifer and Tool is 43!  Yay, Maynard!

Saving the best for last

Alex, Alice, William, and I just returned from Grindhouse, the new Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double feature.  I notice that most of the reviews are marginally favorable and select one of the two features as the letdown—the reason for two-and-a-half stars instead of three-and-a-half stars.  Colin Covert, writing for my hometown newspaper, the Star Tribune, certainly favored Rodriguez's "Planet Terror," but I'll readily join the side of A.O. Scott and Richard Roeper, both of whom favored Tarantino's "Death Proof."  I think the Kurt Russel slasher film would have been entirely enjoyable had I not been restless from sitting in a theater for an hour and half by the time it arrived.   I still enjoyed the flick, but it was just barely sufficient as a reward for sitting though the tedious "Planet Terror."  I'd recommend waiting for the DVD, watching "Death Proof," and then giving "Planet Terror" a try if you're hungry for more.  And don't miss the four fake trailers.  I was disappointed that "Cowgirls in Sweden" didn't make the final cut, but enjoyed the rapid-fire pacing of the trailers I did see.  My favorite trailer was probably that for Eli Roth's Thanksgiving, which was disturbing to the point that I'm sure I would not want to see the movie (were it to be made) but allowed me to get a taste of the Hostel director's work without having to watch for more than two minutes.  (I've seen a few minutes of Hostel and did my best to stop watching is as quickly as I could.)  Rob Zombie's trailer for Werewolf Women of the S.S. didn't seem to have any potential beyond its ingenious title, and the trailer for Machete was perhaps spoiled by the fact that half of its footage was used in the trailers to Grindhouse itself, but at a couple minutes a piece, they certainly didn't do any harm to the jammed-packed spectacle that is Grindhouse.

SDRAM sadness

I finally got up the motivation to re-set my second gig of RAM in my laptop, which I removed when I sent the Alien in for servicing. After checking with two of my neighbors for Phillips screwdrivers, I finally got the card installed, only to find that its presence prevented the computer for booting. Close inspection under a bright light revealed a hairline crack in one of the eight integrated circuits, which seems to be enough to ruin the whole SO-DIMM. I've had to take it out a number of times, but this was the first time that I had to travel with it outside of my computer, and apparently my precautions were insufficient. This saddens me not only because of the inconvenience, but also because the SO-DIMM was a rather generous and timely Christmas gift from my parents in 2005.