On Puzzles

I've wanted to break out my old 500 piece holographic Star Wars theatrical poster puzzles for a few months now, but I just never got around to it.

I tend to collect puzzles. Fidgets. Brain teasers. Anything that can occupy my brain for a few minutes to either distract myself from one problem to let my subconscious work on it, or distract myself AND MAKE THE VOICES STOP.

Alright, I embellish. Mostly, it's just own voice, telling me I'm awful and ruin everything. However it is much easier to shut that voice up when you have to assemble a 1500 piece jigsaw of a Faerie wedding my roommate's friend rolled out after starting it two years ago.

Looking at my bookshelf now, I can see two 3D puzzle cubes, a secret-compartment cube, a collection of Klix chains, nanodots, a Rubik's Cube, some wooden box made of I think 18 logs, a teal pyramid thing, a Rubik's Cube with all the colors reduced to black, a numerical slider game, and a couple puzzle balls. Then juggling bean bags, dice, and an unnecessary number of credentials. Really, anything to keep my mind occupied procrastinate.

I basically sat down with a Sam Adams and worked on this giant monstrosity through all of "I Love you, Man" of cable and an episode of Daniel Tosh after that. Really, if I didn't need to have a human sleep schedule I'd probably sit at that thing for a few hours more. Hopefully, when they go to roll up the current progress, my roommate is aghast at how much I did in only a couple hours.

In an impressed way, not in a "We should really get him some help," sort of way.

GI Joes: Reassassination

G.I. Joe: Retaliation is set to come out soon. Again. It was about to come out this past year, but they delayed it by months at the last moment, ostensibly to convert the entire fricking thing to 3D. Early test audiences, though, suggested it might have been because the movie was at that point a huge steaming pile.

Originally, Marlon Wayans and Channing Tatum, protagonists Ripcord and Duke from The Rise of Cobra, were killed in the first 20 minutes of the movie along with 98% of the Joe team, thus instigating the Retaliation part of the movie.

Channing Tatum since became a huge success late this year, after releasing 21 Jump Street (a guys' comedy) and Magic Mike (a chick-flick schlick-fest). In between he also starred in a wildly successful Nicholas Sparks adaptation and the equally unrealistic–yet in this case based-on-truth–The Vow. Unsurprisingly, Tatum is now featured prominently on the new poster and in the new trailer for Retaliation, very much alive, and has reportedly filmed a few "updated" scenes. You know, like a whole new plot.

The funny thing is, this isn't the first time Duke has been saved from the cutting room floor.

In 1987, G.I. Joe: The Movie was released by Hasbro, following the original animated Transformers movie, in which Optimus Prime drove off to that great big parking lot in the sky. Duke, it was decided, was going to bite the big one as well. However, after getting shot and "dying," fans were pretty violently outraged.

So when Duke got shot, the script was quickly rewritten to include dialogue about Duke being "in a coma" and–I shit you not–at the very end of the film, as the Joes defeat the forces of Cobra-La and cheer, a character reporting they have heard through off-camera radio transmission that "Duke's awake!"

"Scarlet, I need you to know … that I've always … loved … Bob's Big Boy."
"And … GO NAVY!…" *Dies*

You know, you think one Lazarus act should be enough to convince a studio not to kill a character, but they had to unkill Duke twice. At least Optimus came back within the same movie this time. Sheesh.

THANK YOU… | Japan decides we live in future, invent laser holograms

Well it's about damned time.

We've been promised this stuff since Princess Leia bent over for Kenny Baker in 1977.

… That might have come out wrong.

Next step is full-body digitalization a la TRON, right? Ah screw it. We'll probably just end up with something like this:

The Lion King 3D | The first 3D movie worth my $14.50

Last night I went to see The Lion King 3D at my local cinema. I nearly went two nights earlier, but I failed to convince six other men, all very inebriated or already hung over, to take up the task. Because "Boardwalk Empire" was on.

All those guys would totally have seen The Lion King, though.

So screw it, I went and saw it alone. It was 9 p.m., and the theater had exactly one kid, his mom, and about ten or twelve other people, all couples or in groups, and all between the ages of 17 and 35. Meaning everyone in there saw the original movie as a kid and came back to pay three times as much with open arms.

It was totally worth it. My god, it's a completely different movie than you saw in 1994, but even more amazing. For once, 3D actually works because with hand animation, the backgrounds, foregrounds, and all moving elements are already drawn separate from each other. There's a lot less awkward conversion when you can just go back to the original frames if you really need to. And of course those backgrounds are also some of the most lush matte paintings commissioned in the Disney Corporations 82 year history.

It was also the first movie to feature music by Elton John and Tim Rice, who dominated animated musicals for the next ten years, and the film to introduce to us the musically dynamite duo of Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane.

Oh, and the score? The parts not written by the once-domestically partnered duo were written by Hans Zimmer. You might have heard his work in Gladiator, Pearl Harbor, The Ring, Batman Begins & The Dark Knight, Inception, Angels and Demons, and every Pirates of the Caribbean movie, plus about 131 other movies and "Call of Duty." It's the type of powerful, full orchestral backings that, frankly, if they don't leave you teared up by the last timpani crescendo, you're a heartless monster.

But again, it's a different movie. Whereas when I was 8 I found Scar's opus "Be Prepared" to be annoyingly Latin-infused and kind of dark, I can now recognize precisely crafted syllabic structure and choice vocabulary usage. Oh, and I spotted some hyenas goosestepping in what I'm sure I've seen before in Nazi propaganda films. Yes, I knew about that before, but this time I didn't just feel the sense of dread, I knew what it meant.

I also experienced Nala eye-fucking Simba while they lay splayed in the missionary position in a tropical paradise. (I did not see the S-E-X flower petals before that. Pretty sure it was never there, but Disney definitely took the time to wipe that scene all sparkly just in case.) I got to see what kind of monster Scar really was, not as a child, but as an adult who, looking at him as another grown man, thinks, "What an asshole! I should do something. I could take that guy." He's a scrawny lion. Mufasa's huge, but as far as lion's go, Scar's a loser. He even admits as much. Being a kid, I never noticed before; I'd always just assumed he was huge, and Mufasa was just huger. I was a kid. All adults are enormous.

I never noticed that Scar lived down at the base of Pryde Rock and not up top with the other tough cats. While I saw Mufasa as a stern and loving father, I'd never seen the abject terror in his eyes at the thought of losing Simba to murderous hyenas, at the completely openness of Scar's blood betrayal.

I'd even forgotten that Simba's mom Sarabi was so obviously in voice and stature a regal African woman and Nala, as a cub, a rambunctious little black girl. (Although her mom was definitely as white as Nala grew up to be.)

Themes of murder, absolute power lust, personal freedom versus responsibility and duty, birthright, international politics. I had completely forgotten how much of a Yoda Rafiki was, in that little, strange hermit/wise man posing as a lunatic lifestyle. The parallels to chasing down the rabbit hole, to descending into the underworld to come out the other side, cleansing by both fire and flooding, even the witty banter and pop-culture references have aged well.

And fine, I teared up a half-dozen times through the whole thing. I'm not even embarrassed. Like two of those were in the opening sequence alone. Whatever. Give me another animated feature for kids with gorgeous backgrounds, an Oscar-winning soundtrack, and up-front usage of words like "dead," "kill," and "murderer," and we'll talk.

I made this in I think 11th or 12th grade math class, on a school computer
with MS Paint. That was the day I realized I was scary good with Photoshop.

Of Anesthesia: A TMI Thursday Adventure Through Space and Time and Testicals

So it turns out the lumpy scar thing on my leg is actually called a "benign fibrous lipoma," which basically translates from moonspeak as "lumpy scar thing."So says the little Chinese surgeon named Jack. I like this guy. He reminds me of the OBGYN from Knocked Up.

Honestly, this is of absolutely zero note except for one thing I just realized: I will be getting local anesthesia to my upper thigh. How is that funny? Because if the affected area is broad enough, my balls could be tripping balls.

Guys, that's like balls-squared. Square balls.

Or even ball^balls.

That's like four spacial dimensions of balls, cats and kittens. 4-D balls. Disney Real-D^TM 3-D ain't gonna have anything on my junk.

Diagram of a 3-sphere.
This is what both of my balls will look like when
they are tripping over themselves.

*This attempt at humor is derived from finding the humor in gross things. It in no way is serious, nor am I terrified of having cancer. I do not have cancer. If I did I would be making much better jokes about something else.

On Star Wars

Carolyn has an interesting point when she tells me my willingness to buy the complete Star Wars saga on blu-ray is kind of insane.

It's the same movies I've seen literally hundreds of times before. The differences will be subtle and, at best, only truly appreciable if I'm willing to sit less than five feet from my television (which of course I am). It will in actuality be the sixth version of the original trilogy I have owned and the second of the prequels, not including the Phantom Menace VHS I owned because DVDs weren't very prominent in 2000. (Actually I had both the widescreen and fullscreen versions of Episode II, but that's unarguably worse for the point I'm about to make.)

And I'm still buying it. Hell, it's been available for pre-order less than a day and I've already paid for it. There was never any question. There's a question as to whether I'd buy all the 3D equipment necessary for home viewing of the 'eventual' 3D rerelease, but there's still no question I'm going to see those rereleases in theaters. Even Phantom Menace. Especially Phantom Menace; there's a goddam pod race. The question is "Why do we still give George Lucas money?"

He keeps ruining our favorite things, but really, it's like Uncle George telling you you're getting too old to play horsey with him. It's his game. He can do whatever he wants with it. And honestly, we can all shadowcast Empire Strikes Back like "Rocky Horror" by this point. We know the story. We know the finer points of Galactic representative democracy. Political theater. Watching Senator Palpatine for us is like watching Rob Lowe and the mom from "Weeds" in old episodes "The West Wing." We watch Star Wars with so much back story and extraneous running commentary in our heads that the cinematic experience, even the artistic product is obscured beyond reproach. We can never watch Star Wars just like any other movie

And why would I want to?

Star Wars is everything wonderful about my childhood, untainted by any of the sad memories. Like a beaten spouse, I can explain away all the horrible things George did to me, because deep down I know he really loves me, he just doesn't know how to show it properly.

And I will always let you back in, George. I haven't heard from you in a while. Are you alright? Do you need any money? Just 'til you get back on your feet, I mean. I know you'll pay me back.