London's New Olympic Logo

Ummm..yeah...what the hell were they thinking in England? It looks like a swastika to me, or robots having oral sex, or David from The Office (UK) dancing... or some weird thing from the future...

It is the ugliest logo I have ever seen.

Celebrity-based Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Flavors!

Ok..enough with simply Halle Berry..lets try some more unique and fun celebrity-based ice cream flavor names for Ben & Jerry!

Donald Trump's Honeycombover Crumble
Tom Cruise's Just Nuts
Dalai Lama's Buddha Pecan
Kurt Cobain's Smells Like Teen Sherbet
Banana Nicole Smith
Nancy Kerrigan's Kneeapolitan
Britney Spears' Melon Smoothie
Britney Spears' Shaved Coconut
George Bush's Impeachment
Al Gore's Baked Alaska
Saddam's Iraqi Road
Fruiti Guiliani
Homer Simpson's Cookie D'Oh
Homer Simpson's Jelly D'Ohnut
Lance Armstrong's Lemon Jersey Sorebutt
Barak Obamaretto
Johnny Knoxville's Crushed Nut Surprise
Dick Cheney's Go Fudge Yourself

Got more?! List 'em!

Three Hundred

Ok, I saw this the first weekend it came out..I just knew it was going to be eye-candy galore, a bloodfest, and probably not a great movie. And..in fact it is a movie that’ll give your eyes boners, make your balls scream and make you poop DVD copies of The Transporter. It’s called 300. I don’t know what the title has to do with the movie, but they could’ve called it Kittens Making Candles and it’d still rule.

It’s about these 300 Greek soldiers who stomp the sugar-coated shit out of like a million other Persians and assorted armies.
I have a feeling that a lot of high school sports coaches are going to show this film to their teams before they play. Also, gay men and divorced women are going to use screen captures for computer wallpaper.

The movie takes place about a million years ago, and it’s sort of like a prequel to Sin City. Except way less guns and cars but twice as much skull splitting. If you watch this movie and go into a Taco Bell afterward, say to the cashier, "I need some extra sauce packets". Guess what? You’re getting twenty sauce packets...because your face will punch him in the brain. Its that crazy!

I can’t spoil the plot because THANK GOD THERE ISN’T ONE. Just ass kicking that kicks ass that, while said ass is getting kicked, is kicking yet more ass that’s hitting someone’s balls with a hammer made of ice but the ice is frozen whiskey.

TWO COOL THINGS ABOUT THE MOVIE AND ONE THING I DIDN’T LIKE:

COOL THING ONE:
HEAVY METAL DURING BATTLE SCENES

Who gives a crap if the music isn’t historically correct? LORD OF THE RINGS could’ve used some Journey. This movie has that chu-CHUNG kind of metal that you hear in your head when your shift supervisor at Wetzel’s Pretzel is telling you that you’ll have to stay for clean up and you wish you had a sock filled with quarters in your hand. * Note, I am not a metalhead..uit just WORKS with this movie.

COOL THING TWO:
FOES, MINI-BOSSES AND A BIG BOSS

Basically, the Greek dudes are fighting these Persian dudes, but the director, who must have a dick made of three machine guns, does it all like a video game. The Greeks fight every death metal video from the last ten years. There’s wave after wave of giants, freaks, ninjas, mutants, wizards, and a hunchback who looks like he’s got Rosie O’Donnell on his back.

Would I have been happy if Dom DeLouise from History of the World, Part I had shown up? Maybe, but this movie more than makes up for that glaring oversight.

NOT SO GOOD THING:
DUDE NUDITY (“DUDE-ITY”)

These are Greek times, when there were a lot of naked women around. And there are some naked women in this film, but almost every naked woman scene has a muscular dude giving the screen an ass picnic. Dude-ity is something directors put in their movies so people will think they’re serious, I guess, and not just throwing in naked hotties.

Any directors reading this – IT’S OKAY TO JUST THROW IN NAKED HOTTIES. I always try to make a joke when I see a preview with my wife and it says "Strong Sexual Content. Nudity"..I always use my Homer Simpson voice and say "Woo-hoo! Nudity!"..in a joking manner. Little does she know that I am dead serious.

Can’t someone make a movie about naked Amazons and call it PAUSE BUTTON?

My final analysis is 300 the most ass-ruling movie I’ve seen this year for a film having no plot, and will probably be the King of 2007 unless someone makes a movie where a pair of sentient boobs fights a werewolf.

Underlying Issues of the Pet Food Recall

By now, I'm sure that everyone has heard about the pet food recall. It's a sad thing that some folks lost their pets from the very food that was supposed to nourish them.

I think that this recall highlights an increasing problem with the food supply, not just for pets, but for us as well. That problem is the large-scale centralized processing of the food that we all eat.

As few as 20 years ago, much of the food an individual might eat was raised/grown and processed within a few miles of where he or she lived. Today, as evidenced by large-scale farming and meat processing corporations, our food is produced and processed in fewer and more centralized places. Look at the number of brands that Menu Foods, the company involved with today's recall, produces: dog food products and cat food products.

This is not just a threat to our health because of accidental contamination, but makes it that much easier for an intentional attack on our food supply to affect a larger number of people. Accidental contamination has proven to be a bad enough issue. Remember the bad spinach and the bad peanut butter? That's just this year.

What happens when someone or some group decides to intentionally infect all the apples with anthrax? Or else lace all the milk with botulism? They merely have to visit one or two dairies or slaughterhouses and their nefarious (love that word) intent could affect tens of millions. With the smaller scales of yesteryear, they might have only reached a small regional group of people with a similar attack.

Another detriment from this large-scale factory farming comes the effect it has on the small, family farms which used to be the backbone of this country. Simply put, it is now impossible for those small farmers to compete on price or scale. They have been pushed out of the market. In addition, communities are hurt in an intangible way because they have lost contact with the source of their food. Kids these days don't even realize that ground beef comes from a cow. A chicken is the skinless, boneless, grilled piece of teriyaki-flavored meat on their plate, not the living breathing clucking pecking bird.

What's the solution? I don't know. We seem to have reached an intractable situation where we obviously can't go back to "the way it was" but the way forward is even cloudier. There's the price pressure from the consumer. There's the government subsidies which are in collusion with the pressure from foreign farmers and food suppliers.

Some indication of how to make progress may be found in the European system of small markets that specialize in only one or two products. There are the benefits of the growth of small business while at the same time having less capacity for cross-contamination. This is just a guess, though.

The only absolute truth here is that our food system is dangerously fragile.

PS - Yes, I did just finish "Fast Food Nation" a few weeks ago, and also just rented the movie. I'd heartily recommend the book, and really believe the film is worthwhile to see as well, but it truly makes more of a good companion to the book.

Ripping em all!

I am in the process of converting EVERY cd to my computer. I have about 600-650 cds. I bought a 750 gig drive a week ago for just this reason. And then I am going to sell 75% of those cds...if I can. I dfont know what I'll do with the cash..save it, spend it..who knows.

Ya see..before moving to Oregon, my wife was sick of seeing all the cds stacked in our bookshelf, so she told me to get rid of em..and I agreed that they took up a lot of space, and I rarely did look at the artwork/notes anymore..so it seemed to make sense to me, though I was still hesitant to do it. So, I took out all the cds, put 'em in binders, kept the liner notes in a giant shoebox, and chucked the jewel cases. Then I am going to burn all the cds, so I still have them all as backup (or to play in the car) in case the hard drive ever fails (knock wood).
However... when I began looking at several online places to sell my cds, they either wont take the cds without the cases, or give you about 25% less. NICE. Thank you!

I am now about halfway through the burning process. Whats especially pleasant is that I have downloaded about..I dont know..100? 150? cds from torrents, friends, legally off itunes..etc..and when I go to rip 'em, the player sometimes does not recognize the track names and artist..so I have to go manually put those all in. This is less than fun. I have also noticed a few of the import and hard to find cds I have, register the wrong track names, or are blank as well. More work.

I better get some money back, thats all I gotta say.

Don't Believe the [Horoscope]

First of all, if you caught the subtle/vague/crappy Oasis album reference in the title, my hat goes off to you. Now back to my point...

Astrology is a load of shit. Please stop buying into it. It's been proven that people can read any horoscope and relate it to their own boring lives. On behalf of men everywhere, I will make all the ladies a deal. You quit checking your horoscope every day and we'll quit talking about how fucking awesome our fantasy baseball and football team is. Fair enough?

Here... I'll give you all a horoscope that can relate to your life each and every day and I won't even charge you $9.95:

Insert your stupid sign here,

You should prepare to do work in the very near future, especially if you have a job or go to school. Don't ignore it, because it won't just fade away! You should pay close attention to the romantic areas of your life to increase happiness. Always remember to give your family priority over financial situations; it'll pay off later on down the road. You are an extremely gullible person, which could really hurt you when believing astrology has anything whatsoever to do with your future.

Now I know what you're probably thinking, "That is TOTALLY me!" This all boggles my mind because everyone [see: every girl] I know reads this vague crap that gives them advice about their future and then proceeds to plan their life around it. What I've always wondered was what happens if the newspaper, Yahoo and MSN horoscopes contradict each other and say entirely different things? Who do you trust?!


PS - Ash, your entry says "You should get back to fixing Josh's blog from a year's absence or you will suffer severe head wounds. Have a nice day".

:)

Portland to Vegas to Portland to LA to Portland

On Sunday, January 28th, I flew from Portland to Las Vegas for a trade-show for work. My supervisor was on board with me, and she got in trouble from the stewardess at the end of the flight for having a bag in the aisle. We went to the Las Vegas Hilton where the trade-show was held, and where we were staying. It might have been nice to stay at the Venetian or Wynn, but the convenience factor to just walk from our hotel through a hall and to the show was certainly a big plus.
The first night, our British distributor James, Tiffanye from our sales department, and myself went out. James had never been inside a casino before, so we decided to basically show him A LOT of them. We took the monorail down to MGM Grand, grabbed a drink there, and then walked through The Tropicana, Excalibur, New York New York, Monte Carlo, Bellagio, The Venetian and Wynn. I personally would have swapped out a few of those (The Tropicana, Monte Carlo and Excalibur for example) and show him Caesars, Aladdin and Paris instead..but I was not the tour guide. We gambled and had drinks at most of those spots, watched the Bellagio fountain peformance thing and had a good evening. I think I lost about $50-$60 at craps that night.
On Monday evening, I went out myself, expecting to meet up possibly with Tiffanye later, but she was out with one of our clients, so I went out myself and shopped at the Forum Shops and at Aladdin, and had an amazing dinner at Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill. As mentioned in my previous psots, some of our team went to Yorie's or Yolies or whatever the heck it was called..but screw that, I wanted GOOD FOOD. I had 2 mojitos, the tiger-shrimp and roasted corn tamale, the Fire Roasted Veal Chop and some amazing negro modelo and pumpkin ice cream sandwich thing. Needless to say, my meal cost $114 with tip. Worth every penny.
Tuesday was fairly uneventful and I flew back to Portland on Wednesday morning. I went straight to work and came home in the late afternoon, packed and went with my wife on Thursday to Los Angeles.
That night we went out with 2 of our friends, Sandrine and Alex, who are moving back to France. It was a good opportunity to start using my spiffy new Nikon D-80, so you can check out the weekend's photos here (sorry..I didnt bring the cam to Vega$). We ate at Typhoon at the Santa Monica airport, whose menu had obviously changed in the last 6 years when I last ate there, as now there was scorpions, crickets, white sea worms, ants and other assorted insects and sea life that is not normally found on the menu at places I enjoy.. So my crosshairs were locked on to anything insect related. The rest of the menu really was of no interest to me, although Typhoon does offer a wide variety of very creative Pan-Asian fare by a talented head chef from Thailand named Eid. She and owner Brian Vidor would have to be geniuses or, perhaps, just plain mad to offer up such taboo food. But I wussed out and I had a shrimp dish, if you must know.
Friday we went for a long walk, had lunch at La Pain Quotidien on Ventura Blvd, and then my Dad and I played golf. Neither of us played particularly well, but not horribly. However, one shot on the 8th hole was memorable, where I hit 3 trees in succession (pinball bumper style) in one shot. Later that evening, my wife and I had dinner at my grandmothers house.
Saturday, my wife and I visited her friend Jen, her husband and their baby. We went out to lunch at Kay & Daves and I left my wife to have some time and chit-chat, while I zoomed home and again played golf with my father. That night we went out to Pasadena to meet up with my brother in law and his fiancee, along with my mother and father in law for dinner at Cafe Bizou. I personally thought the place and meal were average at best, but a few people seemed to enjoy their meals. However, more importantly, it was good to see everyone, and I think everyone had a good time. The 2 sides of our family dont get together all that often, so it was a fun evening. On the way back, we stopped at The Coffee bean and I had my old favorite, an English Breakfast Latte.
Sunday was the day of the game, but first I went out with cousin Mike, his wife I vee and my new niece Li-Na Isabella. She was extremely well behaved for a 3 month old, and quite cute. You can see a few pics of her here. We had breakfast/brunch at Tommy Ray's, and both my cousin and I each had an eggs benedict served on crab cakes with roasted red pepper hollandaise sauce. Quite yummy. We then strolled around Ventura blvd and into a couple shops; Storyopolis, which is an amazing bookstore for kids, Maxwell dog, and a baby store. At Maxwell gdog, I bought Maximus yet another toy (that he will destroy in possibly under 14.6 seconds). This toy is a blue and white striped fish that says "Gefilte" on the side, and when you squeeze it, it says "Oy Vey!" and then has some bubble sounds. Positively hilarious!
We all went to my cousin Gina's for the Superbowl, had some incredible appetizers and enjoyed the game. On Monday morning, extra bright and early, we caught a flight back home to Portland, and my wife picked up Maximus and then went to work in the afternoon. I went to straight to work from the airport. We had fun, but it was good to be back in Portland.