I realized the previous entry was getting to be ridiculously long, so I moved the book list over here. Read on…
Jun282008
Archives
Jun272008
Top 100 of the Last 25
Great, more lists. This time we’re looking at Entertainment Weekly‘s Top 100 Movies and Top 100 Books of the last 25 years. I’m not going to quibble with the actual rankings of these titles, since such things are almost entirely subjective in my opinion. My super-bestest faves aren’t likely to be yours, after all. But what I will do is follow in Jaquandor‘s footsteps and bold the titles I’ve seen or read, with occasional commentary when I have something to say.
Jun272008
Chick Flicks and Making Men Cry
There seem to have been a lot of “list memes” floating around lately, that is, lists of book or movie titles that compulsive bloggers such as myself then feel, um, compelled to comment upon. Here are a couple I recently picked up from Jaquandor and SamuraiFrog, respectively…
Jun262008
This Is the Moment He Saw His Destiny…
No time today for a proper entry, alas, but I just spotted this over at Screen Rant and was sufficiently amused I had to share:
The look on the boy’s face is simply priceless… and heart-breaking, the poor kid…
Jun242008
Just Because I’m Paranoid Doesn’t Mean…
So, the news this morning was the now-usual drumbeat of rising gas prices and calls to begin exploratory oil drilling in Alaska and protected coastal areas, and I was thinking of my dad’s irrational certainty that the high prices aren’t merely the result of supply and demand, that someone has just got to be behind the abrupt and seemingly unstoppable increases, and suddenly I had an epiphany. My idea was paranoid and sounded like a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory cooked up by the lunatic fringe, but maybe, just maybe… well, consider this:
Jun232008
In Memoriam: George Carlin
I don’t know if teenage boys still go through a phase where they’re obsessed with comedy albums — my guess would be “not,” since the “album” is an endangered species these days, and stand-up doesn’t appear to be quite the cultural force it used to be — but back in my increasingly far-off youth, it was almost as if every thirteen-year-old male in the country was issued one at the door as he left that infamously awkward, boys-only puberty lecture in seventh grade. You know, the one where red-faced PE coaches mumbled dire warnings about how we were going to start “noticing hair in new places” and we’d need to start showering every day if we wanted girls to like us. Maybe the comedy album was supposed to be a consolation prize for having just been made to feel impossibly icky about our own bodily functions. Here’s a record, kid; go listen to somebody making fun of the stuff you’ll be obsessing over for the next few years.
We all had our favorite comedians in the middle-school crucible of the 1980s. As I recall, my buddy Keith liked the absurdities of Steve Martin, while my neighbor Kurt Stephensen grooved on the earthy ‘n’ crude acts like Richard Pryor and the up-and-coming Eddie Murphy. I liked those guys just fine, but my comedy hero during those harrowing early-teen years was George Carlin.
Jun232008
Wisdom for the Age
From a post over at Boing Boing that really has nothing to do with anything (at least nothing I’m more than momentarily interested in), I managed to glean the following:
…anything invented before you were 18 has been there forever, anything that turns up before you’re 30 is new and exciting, and anything after that is a threat to the world and must be destroyed.
I like that. Reminds me of that great quote from Grandpa Simpson: “I used to be ‘with it.’ Once, I even knew what ‘it’ was. But then ‘it’ changed; it got weird and scary. And it’ll happen to you.” Or something like that. In any event, I increasingly understand the sentiment…
Jun212008
Anyone Want to Buy Some Action Figures?
A couple of years ago, following that traumatic flood in my basement, I made up my mind to try and downsize the Bennion Archives a little. Well, the first batch of items I put up on eBay didn’t attract much attention, and disappointment and my natural tendency to procrastinate soon kicked in, and, well, long story short, I’m still storing a bunch of stuff I long ago decided to part with and I’m going to try again to sell some of it. There’s a batch of nifty Universal Monsters action figures up for sale right now. If you or someone you love appreciates the classics, just click here or use the link over there to the right called “My eBay Auctions” to have a look…
Jun202008
Boom De Yada
This seems to be making its way around the InterWebs — I picked it up from Ilya — and it amused me enough to want to jump on the bandwagon:
As I wrote in comments over at Ilya’s, it isn’t often that a frickin’ commercial makes me smile like a little kid, but this one sure did. Of course, it probably helps that I start recognizing people about midway through. Kudos to whoever thought to include Stephen Hawking in there; his synthetic, monotype Cylon voice ironically seems to add an extra dose of humanity to this sort of thing…
Jun182008
A Utah Specialty in New York City?
I don’t remember when or with whom I first visited the Cotton Bottom Inn, a divey little bar hidden in a woodsy, upscale corner of the Salt Lake Valley not far from the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, but I’m certain I started hearing about the place’s legendary garlic burgers while I was still in high school.