As a publicity stunt to promote the upcoming Simpsons movie, select 7-Elevens have converted to Kwik-E-Marts, completely changing their look, and selling Simpsons-related products inside.

I’ve been by this particular 7-Elev– er, Kwik-E-Mart several times, and there has always been a line around the building.  You’d think people were waiting to get into the movie.  At first I thought it was quite the investment to pour all that money into resurfacing the store, but it sure looks like it’s paying off for them.  I wonder if it will have any effect on the audience sizes when the film comes out.

I for one am stoked to see a Simpsons script with writers from the good old days.

I had a burrito for lunch today.

At the next table, two businessmen discussed their preferences in bottled water.  One insisted that spring water contains too much sodium.  They were having a sincere discussion about brands of WATER that are bad for you.

Transformers isn’t the only recent release that is annoyingly inadequate and yet still has millions of customers.

I had a side job that issued laptops, until they recently ran out of work and asked us to return them. Since, I have been woefully unproductive during my hours in coffee shops, or while waiting for tutees to finish assignments.

So this afternoon I bought myself a Presario notebook at Office Depot. Man, computers are getting cheap. This one was $399 after rebate, and it has 512 MB of RAM, 80 Gig hard drive, 1.6 GHz processor: more than enough to run my copy of Final Draft.

The only downside (besides the hours spent removing pre-installed crap software) is that it comes installed with Windows Vista. You know, every time Microsoft releases something, millions of geeks complain about how lame it is. Usually I take it with a grain of salt. However, this time around, it really does seem to be an annoying product, and there doesn’t seem to be any real reason for the annoyance. It’s as if Microsoft has run out improvements, and is instead just repackaging its products, a little shinier each time. I still use Office 2000, because as nearly as I can tell, nothing of use has been added since.

Anyway, time to get back to trying to figure out how to make Vista do what I want it to. At least it was affordable.

Gold star to the first person who can figure out why I’m including the following picture in this post:

If I ever again suggest giving Michael Bay the benefit of the doubt, stop me.

With the 4th of July awkwardly falling on a Wednesday this year, and with Bush’s hidden-from-news-cycle-by-holiday commutation of Libby squeezing any last drop of national pride from me, I opted against attending any fireworks celebration.  Instead, I thought I’d check out the new Transformers movie.  I should have gone with the fireworks.  Fireworks might not have been as loud, but undoubtedly they would have had better plot development.  You remember the cartoon from the 80s?  Any single installment is guaranteed to have better character and story than this movie, and the cartoon was  pretty much a repeated 20-minute toy commercial about robots shooting (and missing) each other with lasers.

Right about here I should probably issue a minor spoiler warning.  Although I’d rather offer a warning to instead use your money on anything else.  Go to the dollar store and pick out ten of anything.  You might not need nine back-ups for your new plastic yo-yo, but you’re more likely to be happy with your expenditure than you will at the end of Transformers.

The logic flaws were big enough to drive an alien robot disguised as a truck through.  In an early scene, a robot is attacking a military base.  He stops to hack into a computer.  All around, soldiers run from explosions… caused by the robot.  Which wasn’t, at that time, causing any explosions.  It was hacking into a computer system.  Seriously, stuff just started blowing up on its own.  And it pretty much didn’t stop blowing up until the moment it was time to ham-handedly prep us for a sequel.

About an hour into the movie, at which point Optimus Prime had still yet to speak, I tried asking myself if I would be so disappointed in the story if I had never met the characters before.  Was I just upset that Bumblebee wasn’t a VW bug and Megatron wasn’t a gun?  But I don’t think expectations were a problem.  After all, someone new to the franchise who watched only the movie wouldn’t have met the characters, either.  In the climactic battle, one of the autobots dies.  I didn’t know which one.  Nor did I care.  Optimus reminded us at the end as to the name of the fallen comrade, right before he shrugged it off because he sure was happy to have made new friends.

Seriously, I can’t understand how I encountered so much positive early buzz on this movie.  The insult to injury will be when it does $6oM this weekend.

So I just left messages and sent e-mails telling people the results after the comedy group auditions on Sunday. Overall the event went well, and it was a super-tough decision because everyone was awesome. And I ain’t just saying that.

In the end, the writers decided to represent, and the actors decided to flake. Not all, of course. I’m not saying every actor in the world is a big flaky flake with flakes flaking off, but… well, you get it.

So I changed gears, and picked a writing staff, and it won’t be an actor-driven comedy troupe after all.  At least not at first I’ll explain that better once I know what it means myself, but I have preliminary plans, about which I’m feeling pretty good.