Hello….?

alternateorg on January 15, 2002

Alternate not being an exception, I’ve noticed a severe dip in ‘blog updates lately.. Hrmm.. Maybe it’s because it’s January and work for us all has picked up (has for me) or if December’s just a natural time for obsessive and often blogging. Who knows.

It always seems like pipelines are the problem

alternateorg on January 9, 2002

The most explosive charge, Paula, is that the Bush administration — the present one, just shortly after assuming office slowed down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrorism in Afghanistan in order to do a deal with the Taliban on oil — an oil pipeline across Afghanistan.

These are some interesting allegations that this book makes. But what is the title of the book? They never say in the transcript. However, this shouldn’t come as a shock.
(link via MetaFilter)

Jar Jar Spanks

alternateorg on January 3, 2002

Why am I always the last one to hear about these things?


Members of The Landover Baptist Church are outraged at the Satanic subtlety in which marketing geniuses have moved this horrific abomination into the homes of America’s youth. “One Mother was concerned that her young daughter was not interested in boys,” a Pastor noted, “she asked her little girl, ‘why don’t you talk about the cute boys at school?’ Her daughter replied, ‘oh momma, nobody I know is cuter than Jar Jar Binks.’ The mother was horrified.” 

What a great satire site. It’s a pity I haven’t seen it ’til now.

The Ghost of New Years Past

alternateorg on December 31, 2001

So suffice it to say that I’ve had bad luck with New Year’s. This year isn’t shaping up to be much different, so let’s stroll down memory lane for a sec and recount the past few:

2000/1: Total god-damn joke. Tried to go downtown but ended up stuck on a train for an hour, spent another hour trying to find a restaurant that wasn’t completely full, then spent another hour trying to get back on a train back to our car.

1999/2000: Actually not too bad.. went to a giant house-party with 808 and smoked my last pack of cigarettes, watched in non-surprise as the world did not in fact end as some had hoped.

1998/1999: Boringly ended up at Wolfgang Puck’s and listened to the morons on the radio count down Denver’s own midnight ball. This adventure led us to believe in 2 years that downtown would again be empty.

1997/1998: Watched ‘Bottlerocket’ while my friend got coked-up beyond belief in the other room and cried to herself all night. Drank one terrible Sam Adams and went home.

1996/1997: High-school age kids who weren’t invited to their friends’ alcohol-fueled shindig have a hard time on New Years. Ended up at fucking Old Chicago (we were starving) and got a flat tire on the way home. Saw ‘Mars Attacks’ and drank wine-coolers with an enthusiasm only an 18-year old can.

1995/1996: Got ditched by my in-three-years-to-be wife’s sister whom I was ‘dating’ at the time and fell asleep at 10:30.

So not to turn this into a loser-fest type thing, I’ll stop there, my junior year in high-school. Here’s to hoping this year turns out slightly better.

The guy dressed up as Gandalf was a bit much

alternateorg on December 19, 2001

Okay, so like any good ex-sci-fi fan, I made the commitment and went and saw Lord Of The Rings at like 12:01 AM this morning. And it was good. But of course, I haven’t been waiting my whole life wondering what a movie would look like. Although lets just say this probably kicks the shit out of that Dungeons & Dragons flick that came out a while ago. So of course I noticed a few things:

Bad:
1. The movie does an absolutely terrible job of introducing new characters. For people like me who have no idea who someone is until the backstory is played out, this can be very frustrating and confusing.

2. And this is only a half-bad thing, but LOtR falls into the fantasy-genre trap of it becoming after a certain point basically about what kind of horrible unimaginable monster is going to come next. Now, I admit that this novel/trilogy/whatever was the first one to fall into this trap and rather created it for everyone else to follow, so that’s forgivable a little bit. But I did find myself a little sick of the ‘zoom into a main characters widening eyes as something unspeakable comes slowly and mercilessly into view and we can’t see it yet and the music is swelling so it must be bad’ type-thing.

3. Seriously couldn’t get over the guy from The Matrix as being the head elf. He seems to only be able to talk that one way (you know which way) and I seriously couldn’t help but visualize the elf in my head as wearing those sunglasses. Terrible, but true. “The hobbits are a virus, and the ring is the cure…”

Good:
1. Don’t take this lightly, because the effects were outstanding. I mean, beyond compare. Of course this is taken from my perspective from the 2nd-row, all the way over to the very far-est right you can imagine, and in the big theatre, too. So my recollection of the film is let’s just say skewed. But from what I could tell, the effects were simply astounding the rest of the audience who could see them properly.

2. Bad-ass-ness. There’s a part with the guy and the thing and the POW and the speed and the jump-cuts and the YEAH and yeah. Action, action action. I seriously was reminded of how much I liked the elves in D & D. Which elves of course were basically entirely based upon J.R.R’s elves and so it seemed to work for me. The dwarf was under-used and I’m not sure why and he didn’t seem to have any sort of scenes that told us of who he was really, in any way. But you didn’t need to because he just kicked ass along with the rest of them.

3. I’m a huge Ian McKellen fan and he was probably the most well-played character I saw, besides whoever the hell Liv Tyler was, and she was in it for like 5 total minutes, tops. But the acting wasn’t atrocious, as some of us have come to expect from Star Wars-esque high-hype sci-fi/fantasy films.

So basically, see it if any of what I said made sense to you and see it even I didn’t. I just don’t think it was absolutely necessary for me to tear-ass around town and see the damn thing at fucking midnight on a Tuesday/Wednesday.