Chicken Spears
It's interesting. Many people like chicken. It's a staple food in many countries and of course there's always the "tastes like chicken" comment to liven up any meal. It's a constant it seems with many except me. Don't get me wrong, chicken is fine. I like to eat it all right, but I don't crave it by any means and I'll generally always pick another meat if there's another choice. Not really a "chicken person" would probably best sum things up for me.
Basically, I think of chicken and Britney Spears in the same way. In general, they're both pretty good and I can stand them usually. They'll even be tasty sometimes. But despite whatever you do to them and no matter how you dress them up to look different, they just seem to be lacking on substance when you get right down to it.
Hence my "Chicken Spears" title. I think my back is bothering me more than I realized...
29 11 2004 0 comments
These are a few of my favorite teas
Tea is good and nice. I've grown quite fond of it since I started drinking it two years ago. I started on on some of the basic mixes and what have you, but since then, I've moved on to fancier and naturally, more expensive teas.
Here are some of the ones I've grown fond of:
Mighty Leaf - www.mightyleaf.com
Peet's - www.peets.com/shop/tea.asp
Equator - www.equatorcoffees.com/pages/tea.html
Twinnigs - www.twiningsteashopusa.com
Happy browsing and good health to ya!
18 11 2004 0 comments
Tags: tea, tea reviews
Stupid Hummer H2
It wasn't just the fact that I felt stupid trying to find parking on a Saturday night my neighborhood for an hour, but more the fact that I was following around people who were all trying to do the same thing. That statistic that there are a few thousand more cars than parking spaces in San Francisco was reverberating through my head as I circled around again and again.
Then, I saw him in his lacking-penis-machine otherwise known as a Hummer H2. This guy that was in front of me was doing the same thing I was and I was damned if I was going to see him get a spot before I did with that unwieldy square box of crap on wheels. So, at the next light, I made a left, he went straight.
I circled more, my arc getting greater as a six block walk from car to apartment didn't seem all that bad at this point. I had driven 10 miles on city blocks for an hour! It was hopeless, but I needed to circle again, just to make sure I hadn't missed anything. But then, as if to send a message I wasn't going to park on the street, I saw jerkface in his Hummer backing in to a spot. That was the last straw. I gave up. I yielded. The street had won and the parking garage twenty feet from my apartment got my $15 for the evening.
I think I really need to get more superstitious when I rent a car and try to park it. There are signs when trying to find a spot and I ignore them, giving up chunks of my life in 15 minute intervals to enjoy the merits of circling like a jerk.
14 11 2004 0 comments
The Darkness
It's a lonely and isolated time of year when we shift clocks and suddenly your evening is far from even with your morning. The commute home is a difficult one. You feel as if you're returning from night school, a parent-teacher conference, or some other thing that has taken up an otherwise serene evening.
It's so difficult on the Bart as you drift from one station to another like an owl lifting from one tree to perch in another. In the darkness they all pretty much look the same. You lose track of time and for humans that always makes it take so long for things to go by when you're not having fun.
It's weather like this that breeds large blankets and a general indoors quality to life that we come to know and love as warm apple cider weather. Well, maybe not everyone, as there is always the espresso and other beaned concoctions to warm your throat as it grows ragged from the dry cold that swirls outdoors.
This darkness will pass. Again we'll see everything. But for now, it's a lonely affair. Maybe that's the reason we dress warmer and thicker; not to keep the cold out, but to keep everyone away as we turn into Scandanavians.
09 11 2004 0 comments
The Beauty of 70's Cinema
So, I just watched The French Connection for the first time (yeah, I know, I know...) and it blows my mind how important the 70's were to the face of film in the US.
Besides Connection, you have Star Wars, Chinatown, Godfather, and many many other films that helped to define genres in ways that have never really been touched since. I don't know why it all culminated in that decade for some reason, but it did. It might have something to do with the fact that while the studio heads were out to make money, they were also people who loved film and thusly threw large amounts of money behind films they actually liked. This is of course much different today with polls, demographics, and "current market trends" defining what should or should not get produced. It's a stupid system for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest ones being that so many small budget films have such a bigger return than all the supposed "blockbusters".
In their vein, take for instance, Titantic. It's made something like $1.8 billion since it was released. It also happened to cost $200 million to make. That means a 900% return (or 9 times or whatever, I'm not good at math) on the initial investment, which may seem pretty good. But take a movie like Memento, which cost $5 milliion to produce and has made $110 million since its release. That's a 2200% return!
Why studios don't try more of these film is beyond me, since they keep paying off. It seems like these guys are too stupid or coked up to see all that was good about the 70's and how independent film has come about in the meantime to make an intelligent decision. I think they're also scared to admit that they have no idea what a good film is.
08 11 2004 0 comments
An Open Letter to the DNC
Dear Democratic National Comittee,
You are pathetic. You are a worthless group. I hope that you understand the only reason that I vote along your party lines is because you are the only choice to a group that I consider to be completely evil and also known as, The Republicans.
The fact that John Kerry was your best candidate blows my mind. Here's this stiff, boring (yes, he bored me even though I voted for him) and just plain uninteresting guy that no one really knew about and this is who you put against down-home shucking and jiving asswipe George W. Bush. It's sad, really sad. Why you didn't run a more radical opponent against Bush is beyond me, since there were so many of us that voted in the Anybody But Bush category that it really could have been anybody.
I ultimately don't blame the Republicans. They do what they do because that's their constituency. There will always be a politcal party that supports the corporations of the world due to the amount of money in them. There will most likely always need to be a political party that represents all the religious nut jobs out there as well. The fact that the old Elephant has managed to roll these two groups and others in to one is simply amazing. They're brilliant at what they do and you, the DNC are an ass for not doing it better.
Maybe it's time to start from the ground up and really work on getting back some governorships and seats in Congress. Getting ahold of the presidency appears to be too hard for you to do, so maybe it's time to stop spending so much money on it.
I mean, honestly, the fact you can't get a guy out of office that is anti-abortion, yet has killed around 100,000 people in an unprovoked attack on their country and has also managed to kill over 1,100 of our people in the process is just dumb. The economy sucks as well and you couldn't get this guy out. You had everything in your favor and you couldn't oust him. I was saying long before the election that if you couldn't do that, then you should just hang it up as a political party. While it's obvious that you haven't done that, it's also obvious that the people of the USA have done it for you.
Get your act together and form some goddamned opposition, instead of being the complacent group of nothingness that you have become!
Sincerely
Michael
06 11 2004 0 comments
Here's something weird
Okay, so I skipped out on the whole Castro Halloween thing. I just got lazy and went the anti-social route this weekend.
But, there is one thing you can do if you want to freak yourself out and that's to lay around your place all day and not go anywhere for at least half the day. Once you get to at least the halfway mark, find some shoes that you haven't work in a long time and put them on. It's okay if they're not comfortable, since this is just a short-term thing.
So here's the tricky part. Make your way outside and walk around a bit. Trippy huh? Seems like a different world, right? Well, maybe not. Your mileage may vary, but this is the kind of crap you do when you're sitting around sick with movies you've already seen.
