Non-Transmittable Things I Like aka Things Featured in the movie Wall-E

1. Humor.
2. Robots.
3. Lasers.
4. Welding
5. Explosions.
6. Photosynthesis.
7. Fire Extinguishers.
8. Sounds that Apple computers make.
9. Lists that are ordered by length of items.
10. Hundreds of hidden references to other Pixar movies.

Where the movie Indiana Jones 4 destroyed your hope in humanity, Wall-E will restore your hope, make you laugh, justify the large $6.00 bucket of popcorn you purchased, make you adopt a Roomba vacuum robot, keep you from stalking George Lucas for an evening, cure your hiccups, relieve your migraine, and bring you closer to nirvana. The last is of particular importance to all of the Buddhist Xangans out there.

Hold That Thought

I’ve written a lot of blogs since I started at Xanga. I decided that I wanted to create an archive of all my postings that allowed quicker browsing and a comprehensive search option. Tonight I finished archiving all of my posts (clear back to April of 2003). Feel free to go to Popeonabomb.com for quick access to my brain.

Note: All of the comments are archived with each post. However, not all comments have the correct user name attached to them. Also, I need to change the title for each post to something other than the date, and I need to add tags to each post. This will all take place, but it will be a while before I’m finished.

The only relation between the previous paragraph and the following paragraphs is that my friend Christina attended a rival school and played on the most dreaded academic bowl team in the region. We grew up in neighboring towns, both learned German from my mom, both studied architecture at OSU, and we have quite a few mutual friends.

Last Thursday she stumbled upon the video of my apartment tour and sent me the message “Are you really in San Francisco? I will be here until September. Give me a call tomorrow at lunch.”

Friday afternoon I ate lunch in the park at Levi’s plaza (where I work), flipped open my phone, and called Christina. When she answered, I realized I could hear her voice. I turned around, and there, unplanned and fifty feet from me, stood Christina! Turns out she works across the street. We’d been eating lunch in the same miniature sized park all week!

What a small, incredible world this place is.

Tomorrow I’m going to purcahse the new Cold Play album. I’m excited about it, but normally when a band starts to claim that they’ve “written the greatest song in rock history” it means their ten seconds from a complete meltdown, a month away from staring on “I Love New York,” and are already dating an Olsen Twin or two.

Mind you, this is after I contacted Comcast THREE times prior to today in order to fix the address error. I don’t have Comcast service yet, and they already anger me much as George Lucas does.

Enough with the negativity though! Other people complain better than I do, but no one else makes a better video clip of their apartment than I do. So, without further delay, I present what a $1450 a month apartment in SF looks like.

Note: In Oklahoma you can’t purchase alcohol on Sundays, grocery stores cannot sell alcohol, and convenience stores can only sell beer that is below 3.2%. If you go to a liquor store, you can buy anything you want, but they can’t sell you cold beer because you might drink it. Yea. I’m not kidding.

California on the other hand seems to hand out liquor licenses to everyone at birth. Every store sells liquor, a lot of it, and plenty of cold beer.

And here is the video of my awesome alarm clock (the one mentioned in the video clip).

I lucked out and got my favorite seat. The one right in the middle of the theater - not too close, not too far, and right in the sweet-spot of the theatre’s sound system (the British spell it better). I say that in order to say this: at the mid point of the movie, I pondered (with serious consideration) the option of standing up, unzipping my pants, and pissing on the crowd below me. That way, when they got home there would be something slightly entertaining to tell friends. I didn’t want their evenings to be a complete loss.

Yes, getting pissed on by a stranger is better than this movie. Other activities better than this movie include jumping in to a dumpster of syringes, contracting Ebola, or passing a kidney stone the size of an NFL linebacker.

Afterwards (after the movie, not the urination), my girlfriend said, with honest emotion, “Are you okay? I kept looking over at you, and I’d never seen you look more disappointed or sad. By the way, nice arc”

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the movie equivalent of George Lucas visiting his beloved grandmother, and then ripping her head off and shitting down her neck. It is a terrible conclusion to a much loved and ever improving trilogy (one of the few trilogies that hadn’t gotten progressively worse… until now) that definitively proves three things:

1.) George Lucas is a fucking retard. I’m not sure what happened to him, but somewhere in the last 18 years, he has managed to contract Down syndrome, move in to the advanced stages of syphilis, retroactively be shaken as a baby, and suffer an acute lack of oxygen.

2.) George Lucas needs to hire me, because I am the only person on the planet not too busy kissing Lucas’ ass to tell him when he has had another terrible, awful, good-for-nothing, no good idea. Same goes for his BFF Spielberg.

3.) The word “Lucas” is now reserved to mean an idea for which there are not enough words to describe how bad it is. Here, I’ll use it in a sentence: “The second most famous example of a Lucas is when Hitler tried to kill all of the Jews.”

Let’s take a moment to discuss the writers of the movie:
A.) George Lucas - He lives in San Francisco. If I ever encounter him, I’ll try to not puke on him / kill him in a fit of justifiable homicide. When “the Big One” strikes San Francisco and kills Lucas in a grotesque fashion, people will call it Divine Providence.

B.) David Koepp - Though this man has done some almost decent work in films such as “War of the Worlds” and the original Jurassic Park, he also brought life and a complete dirth of excitement or content to movies such as “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” and “Mission: Impossible”. Anyone dumb enough to sign up for a second installment of Jurassic Park doesn’t deserve to write again, let alone reproduce or breathe oxygen. And don’t get me started on “Mission: Impossible”.

C.) Jeff Nathanson - Speed 2, Rush Hour 2, Rush Hour 3, The Terminal. I don’t need to say much here, because you spent the entirety of that list puking so hard your esophagus collapsed right after you spleen came out your mouth. Production companies bring Jeff in when the rest of the talent has been killed of in a bizarre and terribly exciting accident, such as a napalm accident at a strange fetish party.

D.) Philip Kaufman - This man has a solid track record: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Quills, The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He has a shining record compared to anyone else that worked on Kingdom of the Lost Skulls, but his talent has been slowly draining since his 1978 work on “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Problems with the Movie:
1.) It had the same color quality and plastic feel that your mother’s first camcorder did. You know, the one where you have to plug it directly in to a VCR, which means when you need to film outside you hook the camera to the VCR, put the VCR in a backpack, and string an 100 foot extension cord from the house to the garden.

2.) Karen Allen (Marion) used to be young enough and slender enough to be hot. The kind of woman feminine enough to seduce you and independent enough to not make you lose your sanity. Now she has become the older annoying woman who sits by you on flights, smells of feet, and insists on talking about bunions while she shows you pictures of her daughter giving birth at home on a tarp.

3.) Giving Indiana Jones a side kick - The second we saw him, we all knew that he had to be Marion’s kid. I prayed that it wouldn’t be true, but alas George, you have ceased to be human, and your lack of intelligence and self-control shows.

4.) Psychic Russian Woman - First, we all know there are no women in Russia, let alone psychics. George, including this character in order to save the life of your first born child would still constitute a bad idea. If the fate of man kind rested on the creation of this character, a real man would have said “Well, we had a damn good time!”

5.) The Jungle Scene - To make roads through the forest, they needed the machine at the front of the convoy to cut down trees. So they blow up the machine and magically the forest has hundreds of miles of dirt road through it? Did they fly all the way down to the South American forests and forget to bring a map that has the most recent roads listed on it? Or did Jesus come down and lend a helping hand?

6.) The Jeep Fight Scene - Yea. We all believe that a person can balance between two jeeps speeding through the forest while being repeatedly being hit the nuts with local flora and not fall off. The conversation on set went like this “I’d like to remove all choreography, timing, decent dialog, and good ideas from this movie.” “You’ve got it, Mr. Lucas.”

7.) Aliens - Because everyone walked out of the previous Indiana Jones movies saying “If only it had aliens.”

8.) Roswell - No one in the entire Lucas empire was able to think of a better idea?

9.) Dumbass Family Jokes - It isn’t an ABC made-for-TV movie. It is an action adventure movie. No Marion. No stupid kid.

10.) The Plot.

11.) The scene where Indiana Junior swings through the trees with monkeys in order to catch up with the speeding jeeps. This is a good idea in the same way porn of Jar Jar Binks is.

George Lucas,
This movie is offensive to the entire human race, intelligence, God, Allah, Border Collies (mine shows much more intelligence than you), and
anyone or anything with an IQ above 70 (when using the WAIS-R).

–

If you liked my review, then go vote for it as a favorite at CraigsList.

I am back in my home town, roofing for my father, until I leave for San Francisco on June 2nd. (I’ve been busy, and today I managed to setup my computer. Goodness, I miss Xanga when I’m busy). Anyways, I’d head to SF sooner, but at the end of May my sister is moving with her husband and two children to Germany. They’ll spend their last few state-side days in Oklahoma, and I want to see them before they head off.

I reach three startling conclusions each time I move. First, the box is the single greatest achievement of mankind (perhaps of the universe). Let’s put it this way: you can do anything with, in, or on a box. It might be an inherent property of prepositional phrases, but it might be that the box is that fantastic. Boxes are so incredible, I suggest that the word box replace the word orgasm. Geeks would rejoice, because the term multi-boxing would take on new meanings. And moving-to-a-new-place related sentences will be more fun: “The liquor store said we can take all the boxes we needed,” “My room has a lot of boxes in it,” or “Wow, a box in a box.”

Second, bookends are the greatest failure of mankind. We can put a man on the moon; we can put a man in a box on the moon; he can have a box in that box; but we can’t produce a bookend that works without a giant dictionary being placed on it. The second you touch a bookshelf, every book falls in to disarray. The results of moving a shelved book are so disastrous that I’m almost led to believe that the damage in Myanmar (Burma) resulted from a bookend catastrophe rather than from a cyclone.

Third, I own too much. I’m hoping that I can take this opportunity to reduce the number of materials good I own. Ideally, I’d like to be able to fit all of my belongings (except for oil paintings) in to the back of a small sized car. In a perfect world, I’d own a Mac Book Pro, an iPod, three boxes of books, an X-Box 360, and a few boxes of clothing.

On to serious business, a few weeks ago I played Scattegories with a group of friends. Nothing creates life long feuds between couples and friends like a friendly game based on personal subjectivity mixed with an individuals creativity for semantics. Here are two suggestion of mine that got vetoed.

Letter: B
Item: Things on a Map
My Suggestion: Bottom - Every map has a bottom.

Letter: F
Item: Villian/Monster
My Suggestion: Fictictious - this is the weaker of the two, but none of my opponents even offered a word.

On a side note, a friend once played the greatest Scattegories word ever.
Letter: K
Item: Things that are black.
Suggestion: Kenan and Kel. - double points!

Me: “What’s going on with you lately?”
Michael: “Not much. Staying busy. You know the drill. Trying to juggle three separate group projects that are due in the next week so that’s going to be exciting.”
Me: “Good thing you have a wife, because you probably won’t have time to play with yourself, but she might.”
Michael: “Lol. That’s one of the stranger things I’ve heard today.”

Me: “AFK”
Laura: “Gamer.” (She said this because she feels only video game players say ‘afk’.)
Me: “Check out this.”
Laura: “Go here.”
Laura: “I like that kitty.”
Me: “I fell for that damn it. I’m going to Rick Roll you at our wedding.”
Laura: “How? And now the groom would like to recite this YouTube link and now the exchanging of online pranks.”
Me: “No - the song is going to start playing or I’ll read it in my vows.”
Laura: “The bride has sent the groom to goat dot cx while the groom has rick rolled the bride.”
Me: “LMAO”

The fact that my girl is fluent in internet babble and pop-culture makes me proud. How many girlfriends know about Goatcx?

Goodbye, Tornadoes! Hellllooo, Earthquakes!

The downside of moving to SF: it is the second most expensive city to live in the United States. In Stillwater, Oklahoma a person can rent a nice duple with a full kitchen, living room, 2 full bathrooms, and 3 bedrooms for around $650 a month. In San Francisco, a 400 to 500 square-foot studio apartment runs around $1,400 a month. Ridiculous. Most of the bathrooms at OSU are larger than our future apartment. On the other hand, if someone has 1.2 million dollars they need to spend, one block from Laura’s new office is a 567 sq-ft studio apartment for sale. We’re more than happy to occupy it if you buy it!

We have a lot of stuff to sell, throw away, and store, so we’re becoming adept at things-we-own triage. I can’t take my canvases with me, so tomorrow I’m going to do an oil painting on one of the larger ones. I’ll post pictures of its progress as the work develops. And I’ve started a photography project: with my Mamiya m645 medium-format camera, I’m going to take one black and white portrait of each of our close friends before we leave. Nothing fancy, nothing posed. They just look straight at the camera and click goes the shutter.

I never provided a list of the movies I watched during Spring Break. Here is everything I watched since Spring Break: 3:10 to Yuma, American Gangster, The Assassination of Jesse James, Bee Movie, Delicatessen, Ghost in the shell, Gone Baby Gone, La Vie En rose, Last King of Scottland, Lawrence of Arabia, 12 Angry Men, Marie Antoinette, Me You and Everyone We Know, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, Sword of the Beast,  Tarnation, The Secretary, Tokyo Godfathers, Yojimbo, You Kill Me, and Youth of the Best.

Is it an exclamation mark in Palantino Linotype 72pt or is it subtle porn? I may have discovered a new, disturbing industry. Either way, you’re never going to look at punctuation the same way again.

I am pleased to announce that it is all over with. Yes, my college career has come to a very nice close. I’ve got 2 bachelors and a 1 minor. Though there are three weeks of class left, of my four classes three don’t have finals (one doesn’t even meet again) and in the fourth class, I don’t need to take the final because I kick ass at neurobiological psychology.

So, until my trip to Israel mid-summer, consider me back to enjoying the second love of my life.

The next few posts will revolve around: the upcoming trip to Israel, a great big huge secret surprise, buffalo wings, a photography project, and the legalization of prostitution. Well… most of those anyways.

I’d like to point out a few things.

1. Simple fact: Ancient man kicked ass at stacking things, because they had nothing else to do. When given the choice of hunting dangerous wild animals or staying inside and stacking various cave objects, 9 out of 10 cavemen pick stacking. It was the only pastime for the entire planet and it had greater popularity than cricket and soccer combined.
2. Ancient monuments are lame. They are just stones stacked on top of stones. You don’t need calculus to make a pyramid.
3. The people and scientists who debate these theories typically have no first-hand knowledge of living outdoors or construction. They don’t look qualified to work at a McDonald’s drive through. Their wardrobes seem to be exclusively from Good Will.
4. Aliens with the knowledge and technology to master interstellar space travel have better things to do than teach cavemen how to stack blocks of rock. They have bar mitzvahs to attend, meetings to complete large interstellar corporate mergers, and uprisings to quell with death rays.

Charlie: “Behold, Earthlings! We have brought you a great technology! With our guidance, you will now be able to stack objects on top of each other. We call this technology Steven.”
Jim: “Remember when we traveled all the way to Alpha Centauri, and those ass holes already knew how to Steven?”
Charlie: “We wasted so much cubic-neurohyrdoxidium energy warp crystals getting there!”
Jim: “And then we arrived late to Elijah’s bar mitzvah on Intergalactican-9!”

Side note: The semester is winding down. Work is busy, and I’ve a long list of assignments to finish for classes. The two-week hiatus was unavoidable for the most part.

Charlie and Jim are the two most popular intergallactic Jewish names.