Seen the new Weezer video? Pretty clever, from a producer’s point of view. These have to be the most affordable “celebrities” available.
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I’m not one to get worked up over the semantics of language.
I have a friend whose pet peeve is people saying, “ATM machine.” After all, he points out, the ‘M’ already stands for ‘machine.’ You’re effectively calling it an Automatic Teller Machine Machine. (It doesn’t help that people use PIN numbers to access their ATM machines.)
Another friend appreciates the fact that my voice message says, “Hi, you’ve reached screenwriterguy’s voice mail. Leave a message.” I do NOT say you’ve reached screenwiterguy, because you haven’t. I say you’ve reached his voice mail. (Meanwhile, as a society, when are we all finally going to stop leaving instructions for how to leave a message? “Please leave your name, the time you called, the best time to get back to you…” Aagh!)
I didn’t think I was as anal as either of these guys, but lately I’ve had some real sand under the eyelid over use of the word, “blog.”
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 On the TV show Futurama, the main character Fry often eats a product called “Bachelor Chow.” One assumes this is a play on Dog Chow. While this is, of course, a joke, and one somewhat pejorative of the bachelor lifestyle, I can’t help see the allure. A housemate and I have commented many times that we’d happily consume tons of bachelor chow if it existed. An inexpensive foodstuff that takes little or no time to prepare? Sign me up. It doesn’t have to taste incredible, and I don’t care if it comes in a box, as long as it’s fast and cheap.
Well, I believe I’ve found the closest thing there is to the real thing. It’s called tofu steak. Currently it costs $1.25 per… well, per brick. Now, if you don’t like tofu, odds are it’s because of the slimy texture or the complete lack of flavor. But these guys have solved that. First, it’s the firmest tofu there is. Secondly–and here’s the real genius of it–they put pepper in it. There might be other spices, but it pretty much breaks down to pepper. So what I do is cut it into strips, toast them in the toaster oven, and eat them with mustard. Prep time is about thirty seconds, cooking time about ten minutes, no real oven involved. Plus, only 60-some cents worth of food required to fill me up. Hurray for the future. |
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“I’m staying in this race until we have a nominee.”
We do. It’s not you.
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Watching the political campaign over the past few months, I’ve been disappointed to see Barack Obama occasionally falter in his effort to elevate this year’s political campaigning. As he put it, “You get elbowed enough, eventually you start throwing some back.”
I can’t help comparing Barack’s struggle to that of Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars trilogy. Among the things George Lucas got right in creating his masterwork was a cogent examination of how much more difficult it can be to take the high road. As the Pennsylvania primary unfolded, I realized that the Obama campaign needs no strategy more complicated than resisting the dark side of the force.
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For the next few days you can hear an online preview of the new R.E.M. album at iLike. They’ve been my favorite band for a very long time, and yet it’s been hard to say that lately. But this new stuff is good! They emerged at the end of the experimentation tunnel with a few new tricks, but they’ve married it to their old sound, and the synergy is quality. Plus, it sounds like recent politics have Michael Stipe pissed off enough to be writing sharper lyrics. ScreenwriterGuy will be listening to this continuously from now till Thursday.
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