Sorry, Wrong Number

Yesterday morning, a strange number called my cell phone. I picked up and a girl said, "Tony is that you? Are you finished eating?" I told her that she had a wrong number, and hung up. She then called me six more times that day. Apparently, not getting the hint that when it went to voicemail and said my name and not Tony's that this wasn't his phone. The seventh time, I picked up. "Hey, this isn't the number you're looking for...It's not it." She then repeated the number she was given and it was indeed my phone #. I told her that I had this # for seven years so there was a mistake. She then asked me if I had a good conscience. I didn't know what she meant. She said I hope you have a good conscience because there's something really fishy about this. I said I don't know what you are accusing me of--do you think I stole this phone? She then said she hopes God punishes me and that she knows I will burn in hell.

I hung up then. But I was wondering...

1) Did she think that I stole the phone and then managed to guess the voicemail passcode to change the name attached to the messages?

2) Did she think that I was a friend of Tony's who was answering for him?

Clearly, Tony is playing her and gave her a wrong number, OR she simply wrote the number down wrong. She claims of course that she spoke with Tony earlier, remember, he wasn't finished eating.

Puzzling. It hurts to get told to burn in hell when you've done nothing wrong. So I saved her # and typed in "Crazy Person" as her name. Will Crazy call back again? I shall keep you abreast of this breaking news story.

Tennis Player Or Psycho Killer?

You decide...(Serena Williams)

Sour Notes

Everytime I watch American Idol, I wonder about this. So in the beginning, they parade a whole gaggle of simply AWFUL people. I mean, just god awful singers. I always wonder... are these people serious? Flynn and I were talking about this once and he said, yes, those people are real. And I've no doubt that there are ridiculously bad singers out there. But can they not know it? I think they must on some level. Right? And wouldn't someone tell them at some point? This is why I love Simon. I mean, honestly, isn't Simon the reason you watch this show? Without him, it's Starsearch. Read: BOORING. But with him, it's like someone is finally saying all the things you always wanted to say. But you don't get in trouble for it.

Sometimes I feel bad though. Especially when they come close to making them cry. That's a little over the line. But still. Part of me is with them. And you know, it is a singing contest too. So they asked for it in a way. I'm rooting for the Indian brother and sister right now. And that cutie with curly hair. And the dude who beat boxed. Those are my current leaders. But I fear for the Indian brother and sis team. One of them is going to be sent home at some point and it's going to be sad.

(To be fair, Simon totes went over the line when he likened that one dude to a 'bush baby'. But he dude has some pretty weird crazy eyes, didn't he? See, what I'm saying?! Simon speaks what we are thinking! And sometimes, we are awful.)

Tagosphere

Natasha just tagged me, so now I have to disclose five things that you don't know about me. Well, most people.

1) I have written in my childhood bedroom in the crack where the door closes, "I Love Brandy". It is enclosed in the classical style(within the boundaries of a heart). Brandy was my first girlfriend. It's also written in pencil. This was in 10th grade. But I've never erased it. I thought it was cute. But no one but me knows it's there. You can only see it if you have the door open and you know where to look.

2) I keep the nametags that my cats had on from the shelter when I got them on my mantle. I never changed their names because I liked them so much. Jake. And Roberto. Roberto was marked mistakenly as a female. Apparently, the name didn't give it away. Can you see I'm a big softie? I keep shit like that.

3) I have a stereo that was left by the guy who lived in my apt before me. It's broken. Did I break it? I don't know. But it has five cds in there that are stuck. Every once in a while when I feel like a challenge, I try and root around inside to get the other cds that are stuck. So far, I've gotten 3 out. Two more to go. Blood On The Tracks and Norah Jones: you are elusive.

4) I used to listen to the opening of Joseph & The Technicolor Dreamcoat every night before bed. I did this approximately every night from 1990-1992. I like rituals. Plus I like these lyrics(say what you will about Andrew Lloyd Weber but Tim Rice writes some good lyrics!)

Some folks dream of the wonders they'll do
Before their time on this planet is through
Some just don't have anything planned
They hide their hopes and their heads in the sand
Now I don't say who is wrong, who is right
But if by chance you are here for the night
Then all I need is an hour or two
To tell the tale of a dreamer like you
We all dream a lot - some are lucky, some are not
But if you think it, want it, dream it, then it's real
You are what you feel

But all that I say can be told another way
In the story of a boy whose dream came true

5) Sometimes I hear the people in the apartment next to me having sex. I hear the people on both sides. I don't know these people in real life. But just based on the sounds, I like the people on one side better. The other side, they don't seem as happy. Is that weird? Yes. But I bet you didn't know this.

Okay, this is where I tag 5 more people...

Phil
Allison
Birch
Tanouye
"Rob"

Old Song Fun

Still going through the laborious process of loading all my zip disks from my old 8 track to my laptop. Two songs I had forgotten about...

"Side Of The Road"
"Something's Wrong Again"

Always Charming

Watching the Office last night(please say it isn't so that Dwight Schroot is gone!) and a tampon commercial come on. It ended. And this was the tagline:

"Have a happy period! Always."

When girls tell me that their Aunt from Redfield is visiting or the like I am going to now start telling them to have a happy period. It seems so cheerful. Maybe I will hand them an Always tampon as well. Hell, maybe Always will sponsor me and this will be my new job--bringing relief and happiness to meunstrating women everywhere.

Also, a fun paragraph from Always' website:

"From periods to spotting to urine leaks to discharge, no matter what your feminine hygiene needs are, at Always, we have you covered. We understand that women come in all different shapes and sizes. And so do their periods. That's why we've developed a wide range of products designed to fit different body types, period flows and preferences. And we all know, the better the fit, the better the protection.

Always. Because your period is as unique as you are."

Yay! Have a happy period! Always!

Wiki Stream Of Consciousness

I started to look up something on wikipedia. I love how when you start something like this, you can get lost. Example: I wanted to know where the term 'plug' came from when referring to advertising. Apparently, it's related to a fishing term for a bobber. So it's a kind of lure. But in the midst of this, it had something about product placement. Which lead me to E.T. and its famous Reese's Pieces tie-in. (And the curious fact that M&M's turned E.T. down first and so they went with Reese's). At the end of the day, then I was back at E.T. and found out that Harrison Ford's first wife was the screenwriter of E.T.

All this talk of E.T. though made me remember one of the world's most awful songs by a man I most dearly love. You know where I'm going with this right? Maybe you don't. My elementary school music teacher(Mrs. Powell) told us she and her son used to sing this song in the mirror with hairbrushes as microphones. It's charming to hear that and adorable when you consider what it was they were singing. It's the song "Heartlight" written by Neil Diamond. Here for your reading pleasure are the wonderfully awful lyrics:

Come back again;
I want you to stay next time,
'Cause sometimes the world ain't kind
when people get lost like you and me.
I just made a friend;
A friend is someone you need,
But now that he had to go away,
I still feel the words that he might say:

Turn on your heartlight,
Let it shine wherever you go,
Let it make a happy glow
for all the world to see.
Turn on your hearlight
in the middle of a young boy's dream.
Don't wake me up too soon,
gonna take a ride across the moon,
you and me.

He's lookin' for home,
'Cause ev'ryone needs a place,
And home's the most excellent place of all.
And I'll be right here if you should call me.

Turn on your heartlight,
Let it shine wherever you go,
Let it make a happy glow
for all the world to see.
Turn on your hearlight
in the middle of a young boy's dream.
Don't wake me up too soon,
gonna take a ride across the moon,
you and me.

And home is the most excellent place of all.
And I'll be right here if you should call me.
Turn on your heartlight,
Let it shine wherever you go,
Let it make a happy glow
for all the world to see.

Turn on your heartlight
in the middle of a young boy's dream.
Don't wake me up too soon,
gonna take a ride across the moon,
you and me.
Turn on your heartlight now,
Turn on your heartlight now.

Oh Neil. We're dreamers you and I.

Comedy vs. Drama: The Epic Battle

Yesterday, I opened my mailbox and found something from SAG that's slightly exciting. A ballot for the SAG Awards! This is the closest thing I can get to voting for the Oscars for awhile so it's a little bit interesting. But more exciting was the thought, wait, I can get some screeners!

I'm waiting for some. Nothing's come yet. But there's still till the end of the month. So we'll see. Anyway, after perusing the ballot, I realized I haven't seen very many of these movies. Let's take a look shall we?

Outstanding Performance By A Male Actor In A Leading Role:

--Leonardo DiCaprio, Blood Diamond
--Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson
--Peter O'Toole, Venus
--Will Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness
--Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland

I have see oh, NONE of these movies. I want to see Blood Diamond, almost saw The Last King of Scotland, and thought about seeing The Pursuit of Happyness till the aforementioned ridiculous Rubik's Cube moment from the preview.

So you see, a screener copy would be perfect for me! So producers and production companies of major motion pictures---take heed! I need these to make an informed decision.

Let's take a look at something else too. Let's check out Outstanding Performance By The Cast Of A Motion Picture. Now remember, this is SAG so it's going to be focusing on actors. Anyway…

--Babel
--Bobby
--The Departed
--Dreamgirls
--Little Miss Sunshine

I was thinking, it's a shame they don't break it up like they do in t.v. because I think that Little Miss Sunshine was the runaway comedy of the year. Got to jawing with the girl who sits next to me and she was wondering if a comedy has ever won Best Picture. So I looked it up. As far as I could tell, these are the only comedies that have won:

You Can't Take It With You, 1938.
The Apartment, 1960
Annie Hall, 1977
Terms of Endearment, 1983
Forrest Gump, 1994
Shakespeare In Love, 1998
Million Dollar Baby, 2004*

*Just kidding. It seemed like it though didn't it? Anwyay, The last three are completely mixed genre movies. They are both dramatic and comedic and romantic and all of that together. But the first three are out and out comedies. Especially, You Can't Take It With You. That's a classic zany comedy.

So sometime between 1977 and today, it became the fashion to think comedy wasn't on par with drama in terms of recognition. That a comedy isn't as high an art form as drama. But why then the saying, "Dying is easy, comedy is hard." And things like that? One wonders.

So put your thinking caps on, what are movies from the last 30 years that you think were worthy of Best Picture status, but were comedies?

I'll give you some help first. Here are comedies that were nominated in those 30 years.

--Tootsie, 1982
--Hannah and Her Sisters, 1986
--Working Girl, 1988
--Four Weddings & A Funeral, 1994
--Pulp Fiction, 1994
--Babe, 1995
--Fargo, 1996
--As Good As It Gets, 1997
--The Full Monty, 1997
--Lost In Translation, 2003
--Sideways, 2004

What else? (I realize some of those are out-and-out comedies, but still--they are comedic.)

Butter Fingers

Yowza. What a game. What a nut punch. That's all I'm going to say about that.
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I watched some movies this weekend.

Superman--Super Awful. Why did they remake this? I also feel they really shaped the story arc lamely. The more powerful part of this is The World Doesn't Need Superman. Like we should see the world openly resenting Superman leaving them. And then he comes back and saves the day, yay, all that. But it was done in exposition.

Mission Impossible III--Liked it. Wasn't blown away by it. This is one of those classic Macguffin stories wherein a terrible doomsday device called "The Rabbit Foot" exists. But it's lame. Like it never does anything. I feel like, in order to properly fear such a thing we need to see a bit of its destructive power. For instance, in the Rock--they show you this nasty kind of gas and it was basically distengrates some dude when some of it is accidentally spilled. Plus it looks all creepy and stuff being in little green neon balls. The rabbit foot was basically a pneumatic tube. Not really that scary.

The Descent--really liked it. Really creepy. I thought this would be a bit more of a hot girls in a cave style movie. But it was much more scary than I thought it would be. These girls go down into a cave and then get caved in and have to find another way out but then they encounter some really frightening cave creatures. And then it gets brutal. I think it was really good because it had the same success that Jaws did--in that, after you watch that movie you don't want to go into the water and after this, I never want to go caving ever. Not that I think there are like nasty cave beasties out there but really why chance it?
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So if you don't live in New York, you don't realize there is some odd natural gas like odor in the city and causing everyone to freak out a bit. My work has shut off the outside vents and gas. And I have a headache, but is that psychosomatic? Don't know. Still, freaky!

Hiatus No More!

Here is a handy list of tv shows that are coming back from the winter hiatus or starting a new season.

TONIGHT
Friday Night Lights! What will happen with Coach and his daughter and Matt Saracen? We're all a-twitter. Go Panthers!

TOMORROW
30 Rock. Okay, so there's no real like big burning plot line you want to find out about, but still, it's back and it's new and that's exciting.

JANUARY 8TH
Studio 60. The show you love to hate is back! Jordan and Danny! Matt and Harriet! Do you even care about their love? No, you don't. But you watch it and bitch about it later. Ah, I love you tv. You bring me sweet crap like this.

JANUARY 14TH
24!!! Can you say two night 4 hour premiere?!? I can. I just said it. Stop making me say it again, alright?

JANUARY 21ST
Battlestar Galactica! BSG Forever. I really hope they bury that Adama and the President December/December romance though. Oogie.

JANUARY 22ND
Heroes! Save the cheerleader, save the world---is this true? The cheerleader was saved(at least the one we care about anyway), but we still don't know.

FEBRUARY 7TH
Lost. Okay, so it's been awhile right? You're pissed off at Lost. But here's something. SIXTEEN STRAIGHT WEEKS OF NEW EPISODES. That's amazing!

Also, doesn't it seem NBC is making a renaissance? Look at how many shows I watch are NBC. Only one is on ABC, and two on FOX, then Sci Fi. The rest are all the Peacock. Nicely done National Broadcast Company. You're totally kicking the pants off the National Broadcast System. I mean, CBS. Btw, Ghost Whisperer returns on January 5th. Err wait, I wouldn't know if it's new or not. I don't watch that chit!

Twib Notes

I fear I have a weak constitution. I always seem to get sick around the holidays. This year, I made it through Christmas alright, but then after I returned from Virginia---I started to run a fever. So I stayed home for a few days. Just watching tv. Some thoughts:

--The NFL bought some time on Saturday on NBC and showed their NFL Network game on NBC. Bryant Gumbel does the play-by-play for them apparently. Dude just irritates me. I don't know why. I think he just seems a little too uptight or something. But then it also hit me that he doesn't completely know what he's talking about. He would say constantly, "The Giants are going to give the ball up on downs". He would say this when they wouldn't convert the third down. And then they punted it away. Do you see what's wrong with that? Giving it up on downs means that you go for it on 4th down, and you don't make it. I'm so glad I just googled this. It was not unnoticed. Check out this story in the New York Times.

--I flipped on the tv on Sunday and started watching the Eagles play the Falcons, hoping desperately that they might lose so the Cowboys could win the division. But right away, I saw A.J. Feeley was in for Jeff Garcia so I knew something was wrong. All the starters had been pulled. And then I saw the score, 39-31, Lions over the Cowboys. The Lions! Yeesh. I was hoping that the Cowboys had done the same and that's why they lost, because it was the 2nd stringers. But nope. Not good. Hopefully, the Tuna lights a fire under these guys. Or else it's going to be one and done.

--I watched a number of movies too. Including a bunch of ro-cos. There's quite a dispartiy between outright awful, "The Object of My Affection", the passably lame, "The Wedding Date", and the sublime, "Groundhog Day". I think part of it has to do with how much you root for the characters. How much do you really root for Paul Rudd and Jennfier Aniston to get with each other? Not much. He's gay. She's straight.

Also, here's something I noticed the first time I saw "The Wedding Date". You don't notice it on the small screen on Will & Grace, but when you're watching Debra Messing at 50 feet tall on the silver screen, you're going to notice--she has an unfortunate aspect to her nose. It's oddly shaped. It's off-putting. You keep waiting for them to change the camera angle. No 3/4 shots! Absolutely no profiles! And I like her. A lot.

Anyway.. All this is prologue. I'm actually infinitely glad that I watched "The Object of My Affection" because I could not stop laughing during the big dance number with Rudd & Aniston and she's like 8 months pregnant. This then folds into the coup de gras where Rudd's kids sing and dance to Des'ree's "You Gotta Be". My oh my indeed. I dvr-ed it, so I'm going to hopefully post a clip of it tomorrow just so you can see what I'm talking about.

--Finally, I watched "Hide and Seek" last night with Robert DeNiro and Dakota Fanning. Dakota's creepy for sure. This movie actually seemed pretty good. Till you go to the big twist at the end. I’m going to tell what that is, because this turns out to be a crappy movie and I want to warn you. So Dakota is DeNiro's daughter and his wife/her mom recently killed herself by slitting her wrists in a bathtub. DeNiro takes them to an out of the way house in the woods so they can put some time and distance between that startling event. Dakota starts to withdraw from DeNiro and soon creates this imaginary friend "Charlie" who does horrible things recalling the mom's death. It gets creepy. You start to wonder, what is wrong with this little girl? And then you start to think maybe it's the creepy next door neighbor(the couple lost their daughter and the dad seems more than put out about it), maybe it's the sketchy realtor guy, maybe Dakota is just bonkers.

So it climaxes with Elisabeth Shue coming up to Dakota's room and "Charlie" pushes Elisabeth out the window(Miss Shue being a love interest that "Charlie" is upset about.) We don't see who "Charlie" is from this point. It's seen through Monster Cam pov.

Okay, so did you figure it out yet? No? No idea? It's DeNiro. He's "Charlie". It's not Dakota who's crazy! It's him. He found out his wife was cheating on him and he killed her and then created this multiple personality to deal with it. Laaaaaaaaame. The worst part is listening to DeNiro's childish "Charlie" voice. Up until this moment, it was an engrossing movie. Then it became crappy. I was sad, because I had stayed up till 1 am to finish it.