What I want for Christmas ...

is for someone to find my dvd remote for me. Holy shit it's driving me crazy!

Inscrutable? Whatever, I'll scrute it

I'm watching the workprint of Rob Zombie's Halloween remake. You know what's not very good? The workprint of Rob Zombie's Halloween remake.

You know what else they're remaking? (Besides Sharky's Machine, I mean.) They're remaking April Fool's Day, and they're making it bigger and better than ever! Instead of 13 cast members, they'll have 26! Why? Because why not! The first one was nice because it had the feel of a movie you could make with your friends over the course of a long weekend. This new one will feel like a movie you could make with your friends, if your friends looked like this douche:

Fig. 1: Remake co-director/co-writer Mitchell Altieri giving the gang-sign for "Cthulhu Spawn"

80's scream queen Kelli Maroney has added me on Facebook. I got drunk and wrote her an email a few months ago, something along the lines of "You rocked Night of the Comet! Rock on, super-fox!" and now my past has caught up with me.

She was pretty great in Chopping Mall, too.

I know way too much about horror movies. Next post? All Proust.

Introducing the Bushnell-o-Smell-o-Vision version 1.0: Poultry

My slow-cooker has been cooking a chicken for the last 7 hours and 41 minutes. The smell has filled the apartment and is driving me crazy with bird-lust. I could leave until it's done, but where would I go? What would I do? Until I get a cellphone jammer there's no point in going to the movies, and until I have friends who are impressed with sale-price dvd's there's no point in going shopping. So here I am pacing this room and counting the minutes until the chicken is ready.

70 minutes.

I had set the timer on the slow-cooker for 9 hours. If you do the math, you'll see it took me 9 minutes to write that first paragraph. I'm not a slow typer; I had to get up and look at the chicken, to gaze upon its beige deliciousness.

I don't know if I'm properly conveying the FUCKING AMAZING aroma coming from the slow-cooker. Thus, using the latest advancements in Van Eck phreaking, I have created the Bushnell-o-Smell-o-Vision. (I'm still undecided on a number for it. I'm leaning toward 5000; I think I'll save the 9000 for the next release.)

The science behind it is ridiculously simple. All computer monitors emit radiation in specific patterns. Van Eck phreaking is a process by which the radiation can be measured and decoded to reproduce the exact contents of the screen's display. With a powerful enough antenna, someone could sit in a van outside your house and see on their screen what you see on yours. Whether the monitor is cathode ray tube or LCD is irrelevant as long as you adjust for both types of emission.

Now that we understand the radiation emission of monitors, it should be a simple matter to create images with specific radiation profiles that will affect senses other than sight, like smell, for instance. It should be a simple matter ... and it is. A quick Google search yielded the radiation profiles of various common smells, and all I had to do was create a jpeg using the exact color/resolution settings to simulate the smell of a chicken that has been cooking for ~7.5 hours.

(It was a quick Google search, but you have to know the exact search terms. I'll not be sharing those terms until the US Patent and Trademark Office gets back to me about my patent application. I paid extra for the Holiday Express Patent Application because you'd be surprised how many patent applications are filed during the holiday season. Most of the applications are for crowd control/silent death devices, so I'm hoping mine will stand out and breeze through the process.)

Here. Put your nose against the square below and take a good whiff.

Fig. 1: Can you smell me now?

50 minutes.

If you're having trouble using the Bushnell-o-Smell-o-Vision 5000/9000, try putting your monitor next to a slow cooker that's been cooking a chicken for ~7.5 hours.

Mmm ... heavenly.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am thankful for you, .

That's what I'm trying to say

Our typesetter isn't really a typesetter. She was a typesetter years ago, but the introduction of computer layout programs has made traditional typesetting something of an obsolete skill. It's a little sad, I guess. Typesetting has been a weird-but-true skill since [whenever] when Johan Gutenberg did his "invention of moveable type" thing.

What with not having any actual typesetting to do, our typesetter takes stories that have been corrected on paper by the editor and types them into Word documents. I then take those Word documents and lay them out in Quark. (Yeah, I know: Quark. Ugh.)

The system works, because it has to. When it doesn't work, things get interesting. This week, for instance, our printer moved our production deadline from Thursday night to noon Wednesday, which meant work had to be done more quickly throughout the production cycle.

We can do it!

Unless it snows Monday morning.

"Snow? Wha huh?"

Our typesetter doesn't like snow, to the extent that she didn't come in to work on Monday. Remember the super-shortened production week? Yeah, that Monday.

I can't believe I feel guilty about leaving work 30 minutes early at the end of a slow day, while our typesetter-who's-not-a-typesetter doesn't come in because of snow.

I can't believe I'm complaining about this. She probably took a personal day or a sick day. She'd better have taken a personal day or a sick day. Regardless, I now know that all bets are off. When you come for a visit, I'll skip whatever workdays you want and we'll hang out.

I'm sorry, cable television; I've failed you

I mean to start watching "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Today the Onion AV Club had an interview with Tim and Eric which included some video clips. This was one of them:



I gotta start watching that show

Adventures in trans fats

I have a love/hate relationship with KFC, iMovie, Diet Coke, my torso, my apartment, and you ... so I saved money by making a [way too long] movie about all of them*!

Right-click, left-click ... it doesn't matter anymore.


* Actually, the movie doesn't have a whole lot to do with you, unless "you" refers to Laura, who did a fine job of encouraging the idea while simultaneously masking her disgust.

On further insepction I don't think I have a love/hate relationship with you or "you." Even if I did, I don't want to. An experience with a KFC Famous Chicken Bowl really puts life in perspective, you know?

The subject line giveth ...

... and the body text taketh away.

In this case: "Get up to a $300 Apple Gift Card from TD Ameritrade"

Sweet!

And then: "Deposit $100,000 into a new or existing account and get a $300 Apple Gift Card – which can be redeemed for products such as the new iPod Touch and more."

Fuck!

For the benefit of Trish (and you, if you must)

The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 (also called The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and The Greatest American Heist Movie Ever Made) is the greatest American heist movie ever made.*

* I seem to remember Jules Dassin's Rififi being pretty great, too, which prevents The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 from being called "the greatest heist movie ever made regardless of country of origin."

Because you read my blog, it's safe to assume you are intelligent and have good taste. Working under the assumption that you are intelligent and have good taste, it's further safe to assume that you would love The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 if you haven't seen it. And if you haven't seen it, shit, son, go out and buy the dvd. Don't even rent it, because if you rent it you'll love it so much you'll end up buying it, meaning you wasted money on that rental. Then again, that rental motivated you to buy the movie, and I don't know what price you put on causality, so ... nevermind.

As fantastic as Taxi Driver is, I don't think it captures the "1970's New York City is a shithole" vibe as well as The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. (Taxi Driver captures the vibe, to be sure, but Pelham *is* the vibe, you know what I mean?) That shithole vibe is part of the charm of the movie, which means the 1998 remake could only suffer in comparison, filmed as it was in Toronto. (According to Wikipedia, fans of the original call the remake "The Taking of Bloor-Danforth 1-2-3.")

Another great thing about the original is that it was made in a different era. Just take a look at the casting: Forgive the skewed chronology, but that best way to describe it is "Walter Matthau is in the Bruce Willis role." In those days, the only on-screen action hero was Billy Jack; the usual good guy protagonists were working men who didn't defy the laws of physics to bring down the bad guys, which is how we got Walter Matthau to be the last believable hero in American cinema. Oh, that'll be "improved" upon, don't you worry; yet another remake is in the works, this time starring Denzel Washington. Will he play it as a gumshoe or as an action hero? And does anybody care?

No, because the original is unassailable. Just listen to the music. (Here's where the "for the benefit of Trish" part comes in.) Here's the main theme. It announces: This is a movie where guys get shit done. And here's the end theme. It announces: Remember those guys who got shit done? Well, this is like their make-out music.

Enjoy.

[Note to my readers with whom I have made out: I heard this music in my head when we were making out. And I imagined I was Walter Matthau in the Dave Bushnell role. That's why I kept calling you "a knock-out broad with a dynamite rack." Thanks for being understanding.]

Geriatric Glaswegians, I love you

The WFMU blog led me here, where senior citizens from Glasgow re-enact famous photos from the 20th Century.

There's also an artist's statement at the site, but I'm at work and my brain is fried from too much Facebook Boggle, so I might wait until I get home to read it.

My not-bad

This morning I re-read last night's post and I thought, "Yikes. I come off as a real asshole." I resolved to post a vague almost-apology once I got to work.

But coming to work has confirmed everything I wrote. There was a story about a memorial dedication that came with six photos. Three photos featured speakers who were not in focus, but whose audiences were. Two photos featured a gray sky so bright that the light was washing out the subjects. The last photo featured two women holding a large framed portrait. Hey great, except the portrait was tilted upward just enough to reflect the sky instead of showing the subject in the portrait.

"But, Dave," you say. "Surely that's the worst of it."

Nope. The incompetent ad manager took a half day without telling me.

"So?"

If I'd known, I wouldn't have let her leave without giving me the quarter-page obituary for which I'd been holding a space. We go to print this afternoon, so I'm left with a quarter page to fill with ... what? I don't know. It's on a page reserved for obituaries, so I'm tempted to run a prophetic obituary of the ad manager. You know, something to put her on notice. "... died under mysterious circumstances ... will not be terribly missed ... applications being accepted for another perfume-soaked hag to take her place ... Who wants margaritas?"