bjciii: My twisted thoughts

In case you’re wondering, this is not about the state of New Jersey, but I still invite you to continue reading.

When I was growing up, I begged and pleaded for my parents to get me an Oakland Athletics baseball jersey with Jose Canseco’s name and number on the back. Yes… I was a huge Canseco fan, can we please move on?!? My parents did not get one for me. I think my dad said something like “it’s a waste of money the way people change teams.” Of course that logic didn’t really sit well with a kid, but hey… we’re all dumb at that age.

When I got older I had enough money to buy a Ricky Watters Philadelphia Eagles jersey… he left the team a year later. My next jersey was a Rick Tocchet Philadelphia Flyers jersey which I got at the close of the season. A week after I received it in the mail, he retired. 2 years ago I got a Jim Thome Philadelphia Phillies jersey and a Billy Wagner Philadelphia Phillies jersey. Thome was traded last week and Wags just signed with the Mets tonight.

So what’s the point? Chances are if you own a jersey that is of a current player, it will be obsolete quickly. Free-agency means that you’ll be wearing an out-dated jersey in a week or two!

Now I’ll be one of “those guys” at the stadium steadfastidly wearing a 13 jersey when he’s shutting our guys down in the 9th. Damnit all to hell.

Ya know those movies you see commercials for on TV or, maybe, trailers for before the movie you just mortgaged your house to take a date/spouse/significant other to see? Those movies that you chuckle once or twice and then think “No way that looks good… maybe if it ends up on HBO and I’m suffering from insomnia some night…” Well don’t completely discount those movies.

As I was decorating today one of “those” movies was on USA: The Fast and The Furious. Yes, I know it’s a bad film, but I had such low expectations of it that it really was a lot better than I thought it would be! Tonight I saw another one which, coincidentally, I bought a couple weeks back with a birthday gift-card: Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. I’m still in shock why White Castle actually greenlit a tie-in with a stoner movie, but hey: Druggies do eat a lot so I bet they dropped a bundle on them sliders! In any case, I thought this movie was going to be soooo piss-poor that the only reason I bought it was that it fit my two criteria that day:

• It filled out the gift-card with no change left-over

and

• It wasn’t pre-viewed

I watched it tonight with Brian & Shanna and we laughed a lot. Maybe we all expected it to be as funny as a PBS showing of colon surgery, but it was a shit-load (get it? I made a link between colon surgery and a shit-load. God I’m funny) funnier than we thought it would be. Anyway, sometimes setting the bar so low that you trip over it makes a really horrible movie better.

But there is still no excuse for The Life Aquatic…

Brunch. Football. Turkey. Football. Drinking.

I think the pilgrims did it in that order too.

Hope all of you are with loved ones and that you feel very happy and thankful to be with them. Stay safe.

So I had tickets to the Flyers game last night and my dad got me two better seats, so that means I had 2 extra seats. I e-mailed, posted, called, offered, begged, and pleaded with people to take the extra 2 seats; first I wanted to sell them, then I just wanted to give them away. No one was buying and no one was taking! It was a pain, but I managed to finally sell the tickets. I will admit that I took a loss on the tickets of $30, but I still got $60 from the pair. I don’t think it was illegal to the point of me getting arrested because I didn’t make a profit from the sale and all that. In any case I was originally offered $40 for the pair (which I turned down) and then the next guy offered $20 for the pair (which we laughed at). As we walked away from the $20 gentleman, he began yelling after us:

Ha! Ha! Ya can’t eat cardboard! Ha! Ya gotta eat food! Ha! Ya need money! Ha! Ha! Ya can’t eat cardboard! Ha! Ya can’t eat cardboard! Ha! Ha!

Just to elaborate: those “Ha!”s were staccato bursts and not a laugh. They were more like “Bam! Bam!” so you get the picture. Anyway, this guy walked behind us for about 20 seconds before I stopped, knowing that he was gonna give me my price (again, no profit… I just wanted to let someone else use the seats as I already attempted a good-faith effort). So he grabbed the tickets, borrowed some money from another gentleman, and gave me $60 for the pair.

Interesting experience and one I’m not inclined to take part in again anytime soon! I really thought he was gonna take off with my tickets! Anyway… the Flyers lost 4-2, so whomever got my seats saw a loss featuring no physicality and a tough opponent. Still… I had great seats

Today was one of those mornings that made me glad I had nothing on the books for today! I woke up and saw it was cold & rainy outside and promptly slid back beneath the covers; it was a good feeling. As many of you know: I love rain. I think it’s very relaxing and soothing and all that other stuff, but I hate cold rain. Nothing saps your energy quicker than a cold rain… it feels like you’ll never get warm again and you’ll end up breaking a tooth with all the chattering your teeth do. Apparently we’re supposed to get a little snow on Thanksgiving too. Snow already. I heard that we were supposed to have a mild winter, but just last week someone told me it was supposed to be a harsh one. I don’t know right now, but there better be something to do if I get snowed in this year!

Ah yes… the second part: Spam. Over the last 24 hours I’ve received probably 50 Spam messages in 2 different accounts. My Yahoo account gets nailed almost constantly, but they do a pretty decent job with their filtering. Usually I only get a few that slip through, but over the course of a week there’s over 300 in there. Scary huh? In my Comcast account (used now for a throw-away account), I get EASILY 10 a day… not counting the ones that Comcast’s arcane Spam-Filters catch. To me Spammers are on the same level of ooze that tele-marketers are. They are bothering millions of people just to cull those dozen dimwits who actually reply to “Enlarge your Penis” e-mails or those stupid Nigerian money-scams. I really wish we could crack down on these people even more. They are the Jehovah’s Witnesses of the internet!

Well I must run now: Mom & Dad are hosting the Thanksgiving festivities this year and I’m gonna go help start cooking. The World-Famous Brunch + The Packed Dinner = a shitload of triptophan people!!!

So Tropical Storm/Depression / Hurricane Gamma has turned into a Nor’Easter which is hugging our coast and it’s going to bring some rain today. Since that’s the case, I wanted to get my leaves up out front. Don’t get me wrong: I loathe yard-work. As a homeowner, I have to do it, but I don’t have to like it. I busted my butt to get the leaves up today before the rain because, well, anyone can tell you that raking wet leaves sucks a lot more than dry leaves. As I was filling the last bag I realized something. I ran inside to grab my camera to see if my loyal readers can guess what I was wondering:

Click on Picture to Enlarge

Those are pictures of my house and the yard that I rake (since I’m attached to my neighbor, we take turns cutting each other’s lawn… I felt it would be classless to not rake her leaves too). So, looking at those pictures what do you all notice? C’mon… you can do it.

That’s right! There is 1 tree in my front yard about 7.5 feet tall. There are no trees in my neighbor’s front yard. There are no trees in my other neighbor’s front yard. So, from that one little tree in my front yard, I got this as a result:

4 full bags of leaves. Either that tree sheds like a dog or I’m doing a lot of other people’s yardwork

This is a little commentary and a little review, so I’m linking it under both headings. You don’t care, but I just wanted to be up-front about it because that’s the kind of guy I am.

So this weekend I managed to catch two movies with the same title and the same plot and (most of) the same characters. Those movies were called The Longest Yard. The original movie, made in 1974, starred Burt Reynolds as down and out disgraced quarterback Paul Crewe who was sentenced to prison after drunken driving, assaulting a police officer, stealing a car, and resisting arrest (not in that exact order). The remake, made in 2005, starred Adam Sandler as down and out disgraced quarterback Paul Crewe who was sentenced to prison after drunken driving, stealing a car, and resisting arrest thereby violating his federally-mandated probation after a racketeering charge for shaving points while playing. The original Paul Crewe also shaved points which got him booted from his league, but it was never made into a federal case. Just thought you would like to know. Basically the warden (Eddie Albert in his sadistic best for the original, James Cromwell doing an admirable job with his part in the remake) pulls strings to get Crewe to his prison so he can give pointers to the Guards’ football team (semi-pro in the original, just a corrections league in the second) which is helmed by Boss Knauer (played perfectly by Ed Lauter in the original while played almost perfectly by William Fichtner in the remake; I’ll explain why in a sec) who does not need any help from a washed up quarterback criminal. It ends up that Crewe recommends that the guards’ team plays a warm-up game before their season and the Warden enlists Crewe to create a team out of the cons for that very purpose.

In the original movie, the heart of the movie was a dramatic story with comedic elements. In the remake, it was a comedic movie with elements of drama. You only really need to look at the casts to figure that out! The remake features Adam Sandler and his band of goons along with Chris Rock. The original had some serious actors with some serious chops. Burt was the smartass back then, but he still carried the weight of the world on his shoulders which made the feelings a lot more believable. Both movies featured NFL stars of their day on both sides of the football (notably present were Ray Nitschke and Joe Kapp in the original with Bill Romanowski and Brian Bosworth in the remake). The remake featured 3 professional wrestlers and a power-lifter as well… diverse casting. The nuances were pretty easy to pick out as we’re talking 31 years between filming the original and the remake, so society changed quite a great deal in that time. Burt, in the original, was shown to smack his sugar-mama around before taking her car. Since that would get a lot of feminists up-in-arms, Adam did not do that. There was a few more smart-assed remarks in the remake that would have gotten snickers of disbelief from the original crowd while the original was a lot more “macho” than the remake because Reynolds was unapologetic for his actions. He merely did what he did because he wanted to. When Sandler’s version had to make a decision, he had to explain himself to everyone. Like I said… a lot of changes in the past 30 years.

One of the biggest let-downs, however, was the final conversation between Sandler’s Crewe and Fichtner’s Knauer in the remake. In true “Hollywood Fashion,” the screen-writer dumbed the story and made it a warm-and-fuzzy ending. The original ending was a billion times better as you knew that once Reynolds’ Crewe (figuratively) smacked away the Warden’s hand, he was going to pay for years to come. It’s this incessant need to make the audience feel good that ruins most movies now. Why did people love The Empire Strikes Back? It was a dark ending! The good guys did not win! It was life: Things don’t always work out for us and we expect that. Somewhere along the way some screenwriter decided that people needed to be coddled. The original doesn’t where the remake most certainly does.

Having said that I really did enjoy the remake (probably much more because I really liked the original). I plan on purchasing both of them in the future (when that pesky employment thing is fixed) as they were both good movies in their own way. The original was just a great, great story with some fantastic actors and a gritty feel to the final act. Reynolds, having played college football, was a completely believable player and Eddie Albert was a tremendously slippery authority figure. There were no rainbows or puppy-dogs and the movie was better off for it. Sure, it wasn’t depicting prison completely real (there were no Oz-like scenes), but the football was real enough for what mattered. The remake was a fun time with some incredibly-hysterical scene-stealers (Tracy Morgan as the effeminate cheerleader and Kevin Nash as the ‘roided-out guard who was slipped Estrogen pills by mistake) and some very slick camera-work for the finale. The script was similar to the original, but the differences were noticable. I honestly believe that the cast was better, position for position, in the original, but kids younger than me who were raised on Adam Sandler will hate the original as Adam ain’t in it. I do recommend both movies to my friends: The patient ones will want to watch the original first, but those of you who could care less about that sort of thing will probably enjoy the remake a lot more. It’s a shame, but it’s reality.

All in all it really points out the disparity between originals and remakes: Hollywood truly believes they can remake classics and do them better. They are mostly wrong. The only remake I have ever seen which is superior to the original is The Thomas Crown Affair. I can’t begin to explain it, but it’s true. Maybe it is because we got to see Rene Russo’s gorgeous breasts a couple times? If Faye Dunaway had dropped the top in the original… nah. The remake was actually better anyway.

Do you know what scares me? I mean really gives me the heebie-jeebies? It’s not the rising cost of gasoline or the fact that our country will self-destruct under the “leadership” of Bush. It’s not some faceless man jumping out of my closet while I sleep to knife me.

What really scares me are those fucking monkeys that clap those cymbals.

You know what I’m talking about… If not, just click here for the picture. You look at that monstrosity and tell me it doesn’t creep you out! My grandfather (mom’s dad) had one and he played with it when I was there. It freaked me out then. Of course I grew up and started reading and I came across Stephen King’s Night Shift which had that damned monkey on the cover. It creeped me out and then I read the short story inside that collection called “The Monkey.” Yeah… that was all she wrote for me. I was convinced those damned things were nothing but evil.

Seriously! You name one TV show or movie or book that features that item in anything but a bad connotation and I’ll publicly apologize right here. Those things skeeve me out like you wouldn’t believe. I was watching the WB’s Supernatural today and that featured the satanic simian and his cymbals, so that’s why I thought about it. I swear… it’s freaky.

And if any of you send them to me as gifts I swear to God above I’ll burn the thing and then throw Holy Water over the charred remains!

One of the greatest sports-entertainers I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching has passed away. He was a father, a husband, a friend, an uncle, and many other things. It’s very surreal to know that this 38 year old man who overcame a serious drug dependency over 4 years ago will not slide through those ropes again. I know a lot of you don’t really care about pro-wrestling, but this is a true tragedy. He will be missed by his family, friends, and fans.

Ya hear the latest?

Apparently Jesse Jackson & Ralph Nader are saying that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime and that T.O. should be allowed back on the team -or- be allowed to play for another team. So we have a dickhead moron in the White House, drugs running rampant in America, illegal immigration still a huge problem, gasoline prices causing people to suspect everyone in the fuel business of fraud, and countless other problems yet these two media whores (well… to be fair, Nader is just a complete idiot who happens to hold press conferences) want to weigh in on the Terrell Owens problem.

Anyone else see any problems with this?