Treadmill Desk, Week 7

Saturday: 130 minutes.

Sunday: 90 minutes.

Monday: 390 minutes. (I think a record for longest consecutive time.) I was deeply involved in programming for this; the treadmill pretty much vanished, which is how it should be. I'm doing more barefoot as well.

Tuesday: 110 minutes. (I was trying to get some reading done. Little luck there, though.)

Wednesday: 360 minutes.

Thursday: 210 minutes. (1290, so far.)

Friday: 320 minutes.

Total: 1610 minutes. Just shy of 27 hours. Last two days were surprisingly rough and I actually had a leg cramp this morning. Little weird. I think I'd like to hit 35 hours a week on a regular basis.

Oh, I did kick up the speed a bit to 0.7-0.8 mph and I didn't drop back down to 0.5 at all--that's actually become to slow. So that might be the reason.

Cinematic Titanic's Legacy of Blood

Episode 4 of the new riff delivery system that is Cinematic Titanic was made available for download yesterday, and I dutifully downloaded from EZ Takes and burned a DVD.

We watched this 1971 horror mess with the good humor of Joel, Trace, Frank, Josh and Mary Jo. And Josh was on fire this time, I must say.

The story is a creepy "rich man's relatives gather in his possibly haunted house to collect their inheritance...if they survive" kinda deal with a creepy incest subplot and lots and lots and lots of talking.

It's sort of Manos: The Hands of Fate without all that searing white-hot action.

You know how bad this movie is because the cast is actually all-pro, including some folks still working today. Faith Domergue, the maelstrom's #1 pointy-breasted poster girl, for example, is one of the first to get killed. And the seemingly immortal John Carradine plays the, uh, dead guy.

But the cast is rounded out with hard-working TV actors, like Ivy Bethune who had a bit part in this year's Get Smart, and muscle-man Buck Kartalian who has been on "ER" and "How I Met Your Mother". Brooke Mills plays the absolutely stunning crazy chick in serious lust with her creepy brother.

John Russell was a western veteran, winding his career down with Pale Rider, as was John Smith, star of "Laramie". Jeff Morrow was last seen (in the riff world) with Faith Domergue in This Island Earth. (Her character is identified as "Veronica" but the credits have her as "Victoria".)

And then there's Merry Anders, who I'd bet money one of my parents worked with after she left the business. (One thing about living in L.A. is that a lot of former actors settle here even after they retire. And most of them die right around here, too.)

Anyway, I've noticed a pattern with the CT movies, which is that they start off blazing, and this one is no exception. At the beginning, the end, and a few spots in the middle, the laughs come so fast you either have to rewind or commit to watch again.

At the same time, there are a few lags, like the badness of the movie bogs down the riffers.

There are probably fewer lags in this than in the previous three films. The sketches are starting to hit the mark pretty consistently, though there could be a few more, and the ones they have could be longer. The timing is improving, as we suspected it would. There's a more natural rhythm; everyone seems to be getting more comfortable working together.

The Boy was less than enthusiastic about watching, saying the old stuff (MST3K) was funnier. But he laughed a lot and slapped his thigh more than once; I think he just misses the puppets.

I'm not missing them as much as I used to, but the "plot" of the show is trickling out excruciatingly slowly. Apparently the crew has been captured and sent forward in time (or maybe just abducted by aliens?) who need their riffing talents to save humanity.

What's good about the new set-up is the use of the silhouette approach to rig up sets that would be otehrwise challenging. For example, in this episode, it looks like there's a tank to one side of the movie room.

This episode stands out because, I think, it's probably the most re-watchable episode to date. I'm not 100% sure of this, but this is the first one where I was thinking "I could watch this again" while the episode was running.

So, good job to the CT crew, and keep the shows coming!

As If I Needed Lessons

How To Lose Friends and Alienate People is the second movie in as many weeks that seems to illustrate the rather large indifference of the American masses to British stars. Last week's delightful Ghost Town showed we don't care much about Ricky Gervais, while this week's similarly delightful How To Lose Friends and Alien Poeple indicates we don't give a rat's ass about Simon Pegg. It reminds me a bit of the complete and utter rejection of the perfectly delightful Aardman studio movie Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, as well as the later, less delightful but still pretty good Flushed Away.

Maybe Troop is right about "perforated abalones" or whatever he calls the Brits.

I, on the other hand, think it's a shame. While this is a pretty by-the-numbers romantic comedy (as was Ghost Town), it's a solid one and provides plenty of laughs.

The story concerns trashy Pegg being wooed away from his trashy little celebrity-hit-rag by magazine mogul Jeff Bridges (as the anti-Dude!) to work at his trashy BIG celebrity-kiss-ass-rag. There he meets nice girl Kirsten Dunst, a pre-op transsexual, and super-hot Megan Fox, channelling a sort of Marilyn-Monroe-meets-Bette-Davis type. He lusts after Fox (I mean, of course) but falls in love with Dunst (again, of course, but for different reasons). Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy pursues other girl--the story begins with Pegg in striking rang of his goal of having sex with Ms. Fox, and I don't need to tell you how that turns out--and loses his soul in the process, but again, I don't need to tell you how that turns out, either.

As I said, by-the-numbers but less gross than a lot of modern comedies, with more slapstick, and with a curious message--or so it seemed to me: That it's better to be a celebrity-mocking journalistc parasite than to be a celebrity-ass-kissing-journalistic parasite.

Isn't that like saying it's better to be typhus than The Plague?

The cast is absolutely pitch perfect. Bridges is entirely credible as a guy who both hates and, at some level, longs for the person he used to be. Pegg has the right combination of likability and unlikability--he's really quite a good actor, showing range by being a completely different person than he was in Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead. Kirsten Dunst is almost too believable as the girl who trades in her dreams for a steady paycheck and a creepy boyfriend. Danny Huston, by the way, is the creepy boyfriend/sleazeball/obstacle to all of Pegg's dreams, and he's got the smarmy thing down pat. Gillian Anderson is excellent as the soulless PR agent bending everyone to her will.

Megan Fox is eerily dead-on as the flavor-of-the-month actress. She's completely superficial and at turns siren, vulnerable girl, airhead and cruel vixen. (Her award-winning movie role is hysterical, too. Stay through the credits, because they do a full trailer.) You really don't end up knowing much about her--she's completely insubstantial, really--which is in its own way perfect for the story.

All the little roles seem to have been filled with care, as well. Miriam Margoyles plays the Polish (Russian?) tenement manager, Bill Paterson shows up as Pegg's father, Max Minghella is the over-rated wunderkind director, Diana Kent plays the washed up '70s actress (though is she really old enough?), and Thandie Newton does a turn as herself, being chatted up by Pegg in one of his more charming disguises.

And, hey, you got your full-frontal male nudity, sorta, in the form of nude model Charlotte Devaney, who plays a pre-op transexual stripper. I don't really believe it myself, as she lacked any outward male characteristics whatsoever and I don't think Playboy and Hustler feature TSes, but since about 12% of my hits are for full frontal male nudity, I thought I'd throw you guys a bone. (Heh.)

A solid flick with lots of laughs from humor both broad and subtle, but it ain't gettin' no love in terms of distribution and box office.

Damned abalones.

Cowboy Barbarian Sex Quadrilogy!

I've been casting about in my story's universe, and I have enough scope for a four-book series.

I tend to do this as a writer, even on technical stuff: Overdo the research and background to get a solid view of things, and then end up with enough for several books. I think it makes the finished product better for there to be a solid universe on which to build. (I think Tolkien did the same thing--not to draw the sort of comparison that would inevitably result in disappointment for whatever crap I do churn out.)

Actually, I may have enough scope for five books. The real problem with this nanowrimo format--at least as I plan to do it, by publishing daily--is that I can't go all Chris Guest on it and chop it down after the fact.

I dunno, I think part of the fun would be to see this being written as it goes along. (I think it'd be more fun if I were a better writer but, hey, you go to nanowrimo with the writer you are, not the writer you'd like to be.)

Also, "cowboy sex" and "barbarian sex" continue to drive traffic! Woo!

We've Got Movie Sign!

...but it's a false alarm, dammit.

The latest Cinematic Titanic should be available for download from EZ Takes shortly.

They said the fifth, initially, but I got an email today saying DOWNLOAD NOW! But on closer examination, they mean Thursday now, not NOW now.

Random memory: My dad had serious bladder cancer in the early '90s. And it looked like he wasn't going make it. We were working together at the time and I was going to the hospitals in the morning, working 12-14 hours, going to the hospital at night, going home to sleep and then getting up and doing it all over again.

I did that for about seven weeks (including weekends, though the weekends were usually shorter). And one Saturday night, I was sitting with my (then tiny) family and MST3K was on--this was back when Comedy Central focused on stand-up and sketch shows and was. We hadn't watched it up to that point, but we were sort of trapped.

And we just laughed our asses off.

It was an experience like that song you and your mate first danced to, one of those works of art that was in the right place at the right time hitting just the right note, only instead of reinforcing the emotion of the moment, it flipped around from something sad and serious to something positive and funny.

When The Boy was in the hospital with diabetes, I grabbed some of the DVD box sets of the show and helpd us get through that difficult time. He's a big fan now, too. (I also grabbed some Bond movies...but that's a different and more embarrassing story.)

With any luck, we'll have years of Cinematic Titanic ahead of us, teaching us how to laugh...and love again.*

*Yes, that's from the show.

How Long Until We Can Correctly Evaluate History?

That's a misleading title. History ebbs and flows and probably never gets too far from comfortable lies. But I was wondering if we had to wait for the Boomers to die before we could admit what a terrible, terrible President JFK was.

"The Greatest Generation" is fading fast, and we're now starting to hear about what a disaster FDR was on domestic issues. Obviously, some people have known this all along, but the prevailing narrative is basically about how his wonderful social programs--you know, the ones that are dragging us down today--saved us from a fate worse than, uh, economic freedom.

FDR's greatness, of course, was spotting the Nazi menace long before the rest of the country gave a crap. And that probably outweighs the vast economic damage he has done over the years.

One of the reasons I have preferred history to current events is that there is less politicizing. Don't get me wrong: there's a metric ton of politics in history as well, but the distance makes it less a maelstrom of emotionalism.

One of the other reasons is that there's really nothing I can directly do about the disastrous course modern politics. (This is also true of history, but not relevant.) Except in my own little sphere, where I can make sure that history is known, that positions taken thoughtlessly don't go unchallenged because somebody (even if it's me) agrees, and I can reduce a little of the insanity that seems to permeate political thinking.

In that regard, I know I'm not alone: Synova and reader_iam (Simply Skimming, in the sidebar) are both of the same mindset, from what I can tell. What matters is good data and good logic, and a respect for the limitations of both.

So, that is encouraging. Playing politics focuses you on short term setbacks and trends, where playing in history allows you to take a broader view. This is not to denigrate those playing the current game, who actually do manage to make a (positive) difference. But if you're not someone who has a talent for skirmishing, just watching the game can be as depressing as being a Cubs fan.

Alan Kay famously said "The best way to predict the future is to create it." Parents are in a unique position to do so.

Manic Monday Apocalypso: Dow Jones Drops Below 10000 Mark

Yeah, not a movie or a song or a TV show but a "current event", as we used to style them in school.

Today I want to talk about a missing link in most apocalyptic scenarios, and that's economics. Why does the world end? In modern movies, it's usually a disease. I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead, and so on--if you allow for mysterious zombie-creating radiation being a disease. In the '80s, it was usually war, preferably nuclear (though were there nukes in Red Dawn?). In the '70s, it was almost always an ecological disaster, usually a poorly defined one, though with the occasional astronomoical phenomenon like a meteor strike or meteor shower. Go back to the '50s and if it wasn't nuclear war it was alien invasion or giant monsters.

But what actually ends the world?

I've written before about civilization and energy. I argued that conservation for the sake of conservation is antithetical to civilization, which always finds ways to use surplus energy. But I was speaking there in physical terms.

What is money? Money is civilization's embodiment of energy. It's not the only one: As I wrote previously, slavery can be an embodiment of energy, too. But slavery is like barter: the overheads of maintaining a significant slavery population are far greater than simply rewarding people for their work.

I read something lately by--I think it was a milblogger--who was saying that civilization ends when we become convinced that we can't build it back up again after the latest attack or catastrophe.

I would add that we can also become convinced that it's not worth it. The USSR's own apocalypse was based on that. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" went the saying.

When Will Durant says that a great civilization is destroyed from within before it is destroyed from without, what do you suppose that means?

Insty linked this book (Liberation) yesterday, which might be fun--and then again might not be, if it hits too close to home.

I'm not suggesting, by the way, that this is the end of the world. Only that "Watch the skies!" might be a less useful admonition than "Watch your wallet!"

An American Carol: Fa la la la la, la la la la

Hectic weekend that it was, I was glad to get out of the house for a bit to the movies, and did go--with much trepidation to see Zucker's An American Carol.

Regular readers know how I feel about clap humor, but as I pointed out earlier, this is the first overtly conservative movie made in my lifetime that's ever gotten a semi-wide release.

So, what did I think?

Not bad. Pretty good even. I didn't laugh as much as I did for, say, Dodgeball. And I would issue the caveats that you probably had best like the Zucker style of humor. Having said that, this movie probably falls somewhere between BASEketball and Top Secret! in terms of comparison with his earlier work. And it's more like the former in terms of "reality": In other words, where the Top Secret!/Airplane! style of movie has people acting deadpan in a zany world, the BASEketball-style movie posits a less zany reality with more broadly humorous characters.

I laughed a lot more than I expected to, and it works much better than I would have thought. There were only a few parts I cringed at, and a couple of genuinely touching parts.

The story concerns a fat, narcissistic documentary-maker named Michael Malone who wants to stamp out the 4th of July celebrations. Some terrorists want to make a professional jihad movie using a Hollywood director, but they need the most America-hating director in Hollywood. This provides a framework for a Christmas Carol ripoff that powers the bulk of the film.

There isn't a rigorous adherence to the Dickens story, which is good: The primary ghost who torments Malone is George S. Patton, who takes him to see the anti-war protests of WWII and how life would be if the Civil War hadn't been fought. (George Washington makes a brief appearance. And the third ghost is living country music star Trace Adkins!)

The movie opens strong with a "duck and cover"-style terrorist training film, follows into a weak (more accurate than funny) parody of "Sicko", segues from there into a sometimes funny, sometimes not parody of a movie awards show, and hits and misses for the rest of the movie. But a lot of the less funny parts are worth a chuckle, and occasionally, if you're inclined, a clap.

What particularly worked for me were: the zombie lawyers, the slavery scene, the crowd chanting scene, the "It's the Christians!" documentary, and a surprising amount of the slapstick.

What didn't work for me were: the Bill O'Reilly scene (the first one, the second one in the outhouse was pretty funny) with Rosie O' Connell (except for the "It's the Christians!" documentary), the Hitler scene, and the occasional long didactic tract thrown.

Parts I'm on the fence about: the '68 musical number, the inclusion of certain serious moments, and the inclusion of heavy slapstick during some of those moments.

I wouldn't expect critics to review this favorably. I'm a little surprise no kudos have been forthcoming for the talent: Kelsey Grammer does a servicable Patton, for example, which isn't easy to pull off in the shadow of George C. Scott. Chriss Anglin plays a pissed JFK, more accent than looks, while Fred Travelena does a Carter that's all accent. Voight plays Washington himself during one of the heavier moments, and pulls it off.

Kevin Farley plays Malone, and if there's a problem, it's that he doesn't ooze a fraction of the sleaze Michael Moore does. He's self-absorbed, cruel and destructive but he never reaches the level of dislikability that Moore manages effortlessly. In fact, he's kind of a heroic character: He realizes the error of his ways and risks public humiliation to save lives. And while there are a few stale fat jokes, he's never portrayed as stupid.

And there are a bunch of other people you're likely to recognize: Gary Coleman, Kevin Sorbo, Gail O' Grady and Dennis Hopper as a gun-totin' judge.

The audience laughed--though not at the whole thing--and clapped at the end pretty easily, but the theater was only about half full.

The Boy loved it, by his own admission being very right wing. He wanted to know if there other such movies and I had to regretfully inform him that I wasn't aware of anything like it. That seems a little skewed.

"This cat knows something!"

So says Robert Montgomery in Mr. & Mrs. Smith--the 1941 Hitchcock screwball comedy, not the weird Pitt/Jolie action comedy of 2005.

The woman completing this pair was Carole Lombard, after whom Frances Lillian Mary Ridste had styled herself upon arriving in Tinseltown (to my perpetual confusion half-a-century later). And like Landis, Carole Lombard died far too young, though in an airplane crash.

Behind the lens we have a young(ish) Alfred Hitchcock, shooting his only corpse-free comedy. In this case, the shallow Montgomery and the bat-sheet Lombard discover that they're not married, despite three years of great make-up sex. (For reasons that aren't exactly clear, Montgomery hides the info from his wife, and Lombard gets ticked, apparently because he wants to have his way with her even though they're not legally married.)

Lombard--who really does come across like a screwball--decides she doesn't want him back and ends up with his business partner, the bland, staid Gene Raymond.

This is really a cute movie with some good laughs that are a little too far apart to make this a really good comedy 65 years later. In other words, it might have been a lot funnier when released, but a lot of the sexual innuendo is nearly imperceptible to our coarsened sensibilities. Still, we all laughed at points, even The Boy.

I liked the early scene where they're having dinner at a place that has become a dive in the three years since they've been there and Montgomery is trying to get a cat (that's sitting on the table!) to test the soup to see if it's safe to eat. (Hence the quote.)

And since it's been a while...some breasts!


Lombard is of course pre-pointy-breast era. She's the right age to be a flapper but I don't think she did the flapper thing in the movies.

Had she lived, though, I'm sure we'd have seen her in a torpedo-shaped brassiere alongside of the other greats of the '50s.

What Not To Wear Review (In Which I Whore Myself Out Most Shamelessly)

The latest episode of "What Not To Wear" on The Learning Channel is not to be missed. A recalcitrant CPA--lovely but rather pear-shaped--is done over by the show's hosts and somewhat broken of her tendency to wear only black pants.

The highlight of the episode was a trip to Lee Lee's Valise in Brooklyn, where the subject wore a lovely green Donna Rico dress. (The Flower commented that she looked "like Tinkerbell".)

Unfortunately, the dresses from Lee Lee's were not used in the final "reveal", leading to diminished approbation overall.

The thing I took away from the episode was that I'd be doing all my plus-sized women shopping at Lee Lee's Valise in Brooklyn.

That's right.

Lee Lee's Valise.

Weakened Updates

OK, it's probably gonna stink, but I think I'm gonna slip in to a showing of An American Carol. Zucker's latest stuff has been so-so, though I am, like, the only guy in the world who liked Baseketball. I don't see this movie--even if it's the funniest movie ever made--having even half-a-shot at success.

Yet, it's the first and only time in my life time I've ever seen an overtly politically conservative movie made and released into theaters.

Consider that for a moment. First. Only. Not talkin' documentaries, although I can't recall any of those either. (They get made, but they don't get released here.) Passion of the Christ? Religious, not political.

Action movies tend to be conservative, of course, because action generally requires the designation of good guys and bad guys, and swift action to be dealt to said bad guys. I think the "liberal" subtext of a lot of modern action movies have undermined them in serious ways.

(The recent Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, for example, couldn't decide if an alien takeover was a good thing or not. Sorry, guys. Just because you can't make up your mind doesn't make you Hamlet. I understand they've similarly perverted the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Inundated as we are with propaganda, it's sort of a curiosity to see people risking their careers over a movie.

I had a discussion with a lefty pal of mine once pointing out that Charlton Heston had, essentially, been black-listed. His rebuttal was that it was one thing for people to reject Heston for his political views and another for the government to hunt people down for them. While this is true, it should be noted that the blacklists were initiated by Hollywood and carried on long after the government had gone to the Great Society. (At what point does it stop being okay to blacklist people, I wonder.) But as we saw in Trumbo, it was really cutting them off from their livelihood that had the longest lasting effect.

Anyway. Since there's no way to get a fair review of Carol, and it's a singular event, I'm going to give it a shot. Wish me luck.

(Far more promising is How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which I'll check out soon, too.)

Scariest Moment of the Haunt

It's cheesy, but the scariest moment of the Haunt was in the Doll Factory.

They had a guy dressed up as Michael Jackson.

Treadmill, Week 6

Saturday: 300 minutes. A lot for a Saturday but I had some catching up to do after Knott's.

Sunday: 110 minutes. Some of you have asked whether I've lost any weight over the past few months. The answer is: I don't think so. I don't keep track very closely, but I did weight myself about a month ago and my weight was the same today. And it was the same as it was back in June when I was doing the Wii fit. (Which I do plan to start up again; I'm not doing it now just because I don't have the Wii hooked up.) However, I didn't weigh myself between June and August, and it's possible that I gained some weight during that period.

You get the idea that it's not very important to me? I do care, but weight is such an imperfect measure. I think I have lost some fat, however, based on the fit of my clothes. I don't have a good measure of fat vs. muscle.

I do need to lose some weight, as well, mind you. But, again, the primary focus is on increasing mobility.

Monday: 360 minutes. Didn't have to go in today. This was very productive. I've started looking into incorporating a stretching program. Strength and endurance are less of an issue now--I'm walking faster on the treadmill now, for longer and with less difficulty--but now lower back stiffness is becoming more prominent.

Tuesday: 310 minutes. I did the longest stretch yet in one go: 4 hours. This is also, I think the most time I've done on two consecutive days at over 11 hours. The weird foot numbness my early over-eager experiments engendered got dramatically better this morning, and then suddenly tonight. Some sort of inflammation finally going down, maybe?

Wednesday: 100 minutes. Had to work in the office today. It was a nice break to be able to come home and get on the treadmill. Weird, eh?

Thursday: 360 minutes. Basically six hours straight. I kicked it up a notch from Tuesday. I've been going a bit faster, too. I've started thinking about getting some real arm supports for the treadmill to rest my plank on.

Friday: 250 minutes. I had non-desk stuff to do. I have found that I'm not set up for reading a book. Need a book holder.

Weekly total:1790 minutes. Just shy of 30 hours. 1490 minutes. So...just shy of 25 hours. I've added a small amount of stretching which has helped mobility. I've achieved that particular goal rather quickly. Now I need a new one....

That Time Of Year

You know what I'm talking about.

That time of year when black cats solicit the undead for belly rubs.

Click for Charity

If you've ever seen those e-mail scams where a "click" means Bill Gates is gonna send you $5, here's a site that actually does give you the chance to click for some cash. Not for you, you greedy bastard, but for a worthy charity.

Right now, 30% of the clicks have gone to Soldier's Angels, which I support. Head on over and give it a look-see. It appears to be legit.