Weirdo

This is just too weird even for Weird News:

Meanwhile, Prince — a devout Jehovah’s Witness — has been knocking door-to-door in Minneapolis, proselytizing on behalf of the church, according to the London Daily Mirror. The singer reportedly has his bodyguards in tow.

“Dressed in a tailor-made suit and trademark stack heels, he steps lightly out of his purring limo and, surrounded by four bodyguards, approaches the modest picket-fenced homes,” reports the Mirror. “And to each astonished resident opening their doors to the peculiar group, multi-millionaire superstar Prince quietly asks: ‘Would you like to talk about Jesus?’”

Hmm, I wonder if one of my high school friends, who's also a Jehovah's Witness, knows him. There can't be that many Jehovah's Witnesses in Minneapolis, right?

Neato

From Daily Wireless:

This morning AT&T Wireless announced the availability of their new music recognition service, which allows their customers to identify songs just by holding their phones next to a speaker. AT&T claims that it is the industry's first service of its kind in the U.S.

After taking almost 30 minutes to get from my work place to the Loews Theatre, waiting in line for more than 50 minutes and alternately groaning and cringing for another hour and a half, I am convinced that I have seen the worst movie of the year. Actually, to be more exact, "Young Adam" is probably the worst movie that I will have seen by the end of the year. It is such a boring, tedious, pretentious piece of shit that I walked out of the movie feeling the urge to stab someone in the eye. It's a good thing that I didn't have to pay to see the movie since it was a sneak preview.

Frankly, I expected to be more entertained by an NC-17 movie. Granted, it's not even one tenth as wretched as "Showgirls" in that even though I contemplated walking out during the middle of the movie, I suffered through the ending, curious to see how bad it would eventually get. Then again, "Showgirls" is so laughably horrendous that it is good in some ways, whereas "Young Adam" elicited nothing more than yawns from me.

Why is "Young Adam" so bad? Many many sex scenes that are just unbearable to watch. The characters do it in such a cold, ruthless way that they are not as much making love as they are punishing each other. They also have sex in the most uncomfortable ways. There is one scene in which Ewan McGregor takes some woman from behind in an alleyway in the dead of 50's gray, depressing Scottish winter while both remain fully clothed. An even worse scene shows McGregor dumping custard and a bunch of other random shit on his girlfriend and him fucking her from behind while she kneels on the ground crying!! I'm no prude but this movie really pushed my buttons. The only sex scene I can recall that is more miserable than the afore-mentioned ones takes place in "Enemy at the Gates," when Jude Law and Rachel Weisz, both of whom are clad in wretched, filthy Russian army uniforms, get it on in the middle of a battlefield while bullets from German snipers are whizzing by. Did I mention they do it next to their fallen comrades? I hope I've made it abundantly clear that one shouldn't go see "Young Adam" for the gratuitous sex scenes.

What else? The plot itself is just not compelling enough to keep me interested. Actually, there really isn't much of a plot other than a bunch of random, unpleasant sex scenes and shots of the characters smoking and looking gloomy loosely stringed together. You would think the movie would at least be somewhat interesting when it has a non-linear narrative as well as a murder. Instead, the narrative (which would have felt somewhat original if this movie had come out before "Pulp Fiction" and "Memento") just feels like a cheap gimmick used to mask the pointlessness of the entire movie. Nope, I just felt bored and annoyed when I wasn't laughing at the absurd situations in which the characters found themselves naked. The only funny moment came when someone in the audience let out this loud guffaw at a totally inappropriate moment. I think the guy laughed when one of the characters died or was getting abused or something. It was like a Sunday Flicks flashback.

Anyways, I will definitely be more careful about watching sneak previews from now on, even if they are free.

Young Adam

After taking almost 30 minutes to get from my work place to the Loews Theatre, waiting in line for more than 50 minutes and alternately groaning and cringing for another hour and a half, I am convinced that I have seen the worst movie of the year. Actually, to be more exact, "Young Adam" is probably the worst movie that I will have seen by the end of the year. It is such a boring, tedious, pretentious piece of shit that I walked out of the movie feeling the urge to stab someone in the eye. It's a good thing that I didn't have to pay to see the movie since it was a sneak preview.

Frankly, I expected to be more entertained by an NC-17 movie. Granted, it's not even one tenth as wretched as "Showgirls" in that even though I contemplated walking out during the middle of the movie, I suffered through the ending, curious to see how bad it would eventually get. Then again, "Showgirls" is so laughably horrendous that it is good in someways, whereas "Young Adam" elicited nothing more than yawns from me.

Why is "Young Adam" so bad? Many many sex scenes that are just unbearable to watch. The characters do it in such a cold, ruthless way that they are not as much making love as they are punishing each other. They also have sex in the most uncomfortable ways. There is one scene in which Ewan McGregor takes some woman from behind in an alleyway in the dead of 50's gray, depressing Scottish winter while both remain fully clothed. An even worse scene shows McGregor dumping custard and a bunch of other random shit on his girlfriend and him fucking her from behind while she kneels on the ground crying!! I'm no prude but this movie really pushed my buttons. The only sex scene I can recall that is worse than the afore-mentioned ones takes place in "Enemy at the Gates," when Jude Law and Rachel Weisz, both of whom are clad in wretched, filthy Russian army uniforms, get it on in the middle of a battlefield while bullets from German snipers are whizzing by. Did I mention they do it next to their fallen comrades? I hope I've made it abundantly clear that one shouldn't go see "Young Adam" for the gratuitous sex scenes.

What else? The plot itself is just not compelling enough to keep me interested. Actually, there really isn't much of a plot other than a bunch of random, unpleasant sex scenes and shots of the characters smoking and looking gloomy loosely stringed together. You would think the movie would at least be somewhat interesting when it has a non-linear narrative as well as a murder. Instead, the narrative (which would have felt somewhat original if this movie had come out before "Pulp Fiction" and "Memento") just feels like a cheap gimmick used to mask the pointlessness of the entire movie. Nope, I just felt bored and annoyed when I wasn't laughing at the absurd situations in which the characters found themselves naked. The only funny moment came when someone in the audience let out this loud guffaw at a totally inappropriate moment. I think the guy laughed when one of the characters died or was getting abused or something. It was like a Sunday Flicks flashback.

Anyways, I will definitely be more careful about watching sneak previews from now on, even if they are free.

Randomness

I was chatting with Allen today and he sent me a link to a racy ad that he found in Germany. Upon seeing the ad, my first reaction was, I need to move to Germany damn it! After seeing the ad, I had "let me see that thong... thong thong thong thong thong" stuck in my head for the rest of the day, which made my attempts at debugging code more difficult than was necessary.

When Allen was telling me about this cool Chinese kid that he met in Prague in the kid's family's restaurant, I thought 1.) they have Chinese restaurants in Prague? And 2.) maybe those 7 Chinese men abducted in Iraq were trying to open the first post-liberation Chinese restaurant in Iraq.

BTW, Blogger dictionary apparently doesn't recognize the word "thong." Weird.

Does This Article Surprise Anyone Anymore?

From the Chronicle:

"The federal tax system that millions of Americans are forced to deal with before April 15 is not at all what you think it is. Congress has changed it in recent decades from a progressive system in which the more one earns the more one pays in income taxes. It has become a subsidy system for the super rich.

Through explicit policies, as well as tax laws never reported in the news, Congress now literally takes money from those making $30,000 to $500,000 per year and funnels it in subtle ways to the super rich -- the top 1/100th of 1 percent of Americans.

People making $60,000 paid a larger share of their 2001 income in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes than a family making $25 million, the latest Internal Revenue Service data show. And in income taxes alone, people making $400,000 paid a larger share of their incomes than the 7,000 households who made $10 million or more..."

More Google

Here's an interesting speculation about the ultimate goal of Google: a global operating system that allows you to access your documents from anywhere any time.

You Know What's Disturbing?

Finding a random handkerchief among MY washed and dried laundry. Who the hell still uses handkerchief nowadays? Ever heard of progress? Kleenex?

Haha, Dumb Asses

From the Chronicle:

Lesson VI: Determining the biggest shots of the season depends on where you sit.

Chris Duhon's 35-foot, banked-in 3-pointer at the buzzer against Connecticut on Saturday was meaningless to the players, because UConn still won by a point, but with the betting spread on the game being two to three points, that shot, according to an ESPN.com report, shifted somewhere between $30 million and $100 million in betting profits from UConn backers to Duke backers.

Sigh

I just read this from the Chronicle's website: "Fifth-ranked Cal's top pitcher, Kristina Thorson, takes her hair and her 15-0 record into a weekend series with No. 9 Stanford. Is she glad she landed at Cal? 'I'm so glad I didn't get accepted to Stanford. I love Cal. It's just as good, if not better, and not so stuffy.' Games on!"

What is UP with these Cal people? It's like some of them have an inferiority complex, always trying to pick a fight with us. Loooozers.