Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Thursday, June 30, 2011 The Long, Unhappy Life of Bob Marshall By this point, our family's pretty familiar with Highway 16, the main road that cuts from east to west across Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota. There's the entrance, the campground with cabins we stayed at this time, the General Store, the tent sites by the creek we camped at last time, the Shady Rest Picnic Area (not a retirement home, like it sounds), lots of curves, probably a few bison and other animals wandering around, Legion Lake, and Camp Bob Marshall. We don't know who Bob Marshall is or why he got a camp named after him, but it's not a terribly uncommon name. Which makes us wonder how other Bob Marshalls might react to seeing that sign. Imagine your name is Bob Marshall. You see a sign by the side of the road that says "Camp Bob Marshall." As a law-abiding citizen, you do your best to obey all road signs. So what choice do you have but to camp there for the night? Sucks to be you, Bob Marshall, because you don't have your camping gear with you. Now you're going to have to turn around and go back to the Pamida in Custer to pick up a tent and all the other gear you'll need to rough it in the state park overnight. I hope you budgeted this into your travel time. And you know, something else, Bob Marshall? It's bad enough if you're on a cross-country drive, because this is going to add a whole extra day to your trip. But what if this is on your daily commute between home and work? I can just see your boss and coworkers asking each other, "Where's Bob Marshall?" "Oh, no, he probably drove through Custer State Park again." That means we won't see him until tomorrow." "When will Bob Marshall ever learn?" And then you show up for work the next day, rumpled, mosquito-bitten, and smelling of wood smoke, and you have to explain how you needed to camp for the night because a sign said you had to. And your boss and coworkers ask, "Why don't you just drive a different way to work?" And you have to say, "But this is the most direct route! Going around would add like an hour to my commute." "Oh, Bob Marshall," your coworkers say, shaking their heads. But you get through the day, and as you head home, you tell your coworkers, "See you tomorrow." But they just say "See you," because they know that there are signs reading "Camp Bob Marshall" facing both directions on Highway 16. And while you, Bob Marshall, are looking forward to seeing your wife again tonight, she knows full well that in a few hours she'll be calling you on your cell phone with its one bar. "Where are you?" she'll sigh. "Well, there was this sign," you'll explain over the rotten connection. Lucky you had your camping gear in your car already. Sleep well, Bob Marshall. And don't unload your car before you leave for work tomorrow. posted by M. Giant 1:13 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Sunday, June 26, 2011 The Finger Prepping for these long-range camping road trips is always stressful under the best of circumstances, but this one was even more so. In addition to the trip itself I was also supposed to be prepping for this conference I'm going to as part of the trip. Leaving aside figuring out what I'm going to say, this is the first time I've ever had to pack both camping clothes and business clothes. And it's not a question of if we forgot something, but what we forgot and how screwed we're going to be as a result. It's an ever-growing list. We were still in Minnesota when I realized I had completely forgotten to do something vital. The good news is that it was something I could take care of on our next pit stop. If only I didn't forget again. Our pit stops can be a bit hectic, between me and Trash and M. Edium and all the shit that falls out of the back seat when we open M. Edium's door. Just across the South Dakota state line, we hit a rest stop and I realized I wasn't going to be able to do it after all. The pen that I keep in my pocket at almost all times wasn't there. But I was in luck, because there was a sign in the restroom inviting visitors to sign the guest book, which meant there was a pen already there. As soon as M. Edium and I were back out in the lobby, I told him to wait while I got to work doing what I needed to do. It would only take a second. "Can I help you?" asked the attendant behind the counter who I hadn't noticed in my urgency to complete my task. I realized that what I was doing might look a little odd, so I said, "Just signing the guest book," and signed it before making a quick escape. M. Edium and I caught up with Trash out in the picnic area, which is when I realized my own pen was in my pocket after all. I did the necessary touch-ups while they were otherwise occupied and soon we were all back on our way. The Missouri River is pretty much the only major geographical landmark between there and the Badlands, so we always look forward to the crossing. We didn't cross it the first day, however. For the first time, we were going to spend the night at it. This proved to be more literally true than we thought. We had reserved a camping cabin at the Snake Creek Recreation Area outside Platte, SD, and were hoping for a view of the river. When we got there, we discovered that due to all the recent flooding, the river was closer to our cabin than my old cubicle was to the office bathroom. I wanted to take M. Edium to the swimming beach, but he can't dive that deep. Instead he swam around the trees at a flooded campsite where the roadway disappeared under the quiet waters of a small inlet that, from what I understand, isn't normally there. Fortunately nobody was camping there or they might have objected to our invasion of their space. The next morning we got back on the road. From our first sighting of the Missouri to our crossing it had been sixteen hours. Now, west of the Missouri, Interstate 90 begins to bristle with billboards. Not just for Wall Drug, either. There's the Reptile Gardens, the Auto Museum, the 1880 Town (complete with Dances with Wolves props), and the Rushmore Borglum museum, to name a few. This last tourist trap is all about the sculptor who "carved the mountain," and all the billboards are illustrated with the same drawing of Gutzon Borglum, gazing out ruggedly from under a cowboy hat and from behind his repressed black mustache, leaning back with his chin against his chest. Trash and I have been making fun of those billboards for almost twenty years, since the first time we drove out west in 1992. Every time we'd see one, we'd tuck our chins against our chests, and look at each other with our fingers laid across our upper lips to simulate the famous mustache. I was expecting to start seeing these as soon as we were in South Dakota, but they were making a late appearance on this trip, and we didn't see any until the second day of our trip. Finally, some smaller ones started popping up. I let a few of these go by without comment. But after a while, we spotted a full-sized one and I leaned back, tucked my chin down, and held up my finger…with the ink mustache I'd drawn on it the day before, more than a hundred miles ago. Trash hates to admit defeat, but she had to this time. I totally win at Rushmore Borglum. posted by M. Giant 6:48 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Nice!
By Wednesday, June 22, 2011 Suit Up Trash and I don't generally invest a lot of money in our wardrobes. Not too many years ago, she was contemplating the possibility of a new job with a significant pay raise. "I'm going to go to the store and spend, like, a hundred dollars on clothes," she said dreamily. I laughed, but I'm not much better. What clothes I don't get for Christmas or on the Internet I buy off a big table at Costco. After all, I've been a telecommuter for three years. Before that it was almost two decades of "business casual," punctuated by one year in an office where buttons seemed to be optional, not just on shirts but on pants as well. It all adds up to the fact that the last time I bought a proper suit for myself was when George Bush was president. No, the other one. But because I've been invited to some fancy-schmancy conference over the Fourth of July weekend (more on that later), that had to change, big time. Or at least that's what Trash said when she fully contemplated the condition of my formal wardrobe: A double-breasted charcoal pinstripe suit whose pants are held together only by the inside button and my belt; A medium-gray suit whose pants crawl up my ass and are still spattered with Missouri mud; A black blazer that was really nice when my mother-in-law gave it to me for Christmas 1991 but which is now as shiny as Darth Vader's helmet; Another black blazer with big, brass buttons, from the Andy Bernard line of men's fashions; A windowpane plaid suit, somewhere, I don't know, I can't find it anywhere; A black David Byrne-sized suit jacket I bought in high school for ten dollars in lawn-watering money at the Salvation Army thrift store; The one "suit" I ever bought on my own, a hundred-dollar number made of brown linen that looked pretty sharp in the store but on me appears to be made out of used grocery bags and makes me look like nothing so much as a polygamist. But -- a hundred dollars!  In other words, just enough to get me through job interviews and funerals, and Halloween while I tried to figure out which of those first two I hated worse. Still, I didn't want to spend a bunch of money on new suits, so I suggested starting at Marshall's, which I hate more than funerals or job interviews. Trash, knowing this, nixed that and dragged me into Macy's instead. I know, right? Since there wasn't time to have alterations done, Trash and a very helpful and patient salesman named John took me in hand (not like that, this wasn't Joey Tribbiani's tailor) and helped me find a couple of great suits off the rack. Black and gray, naturally. One of them is an Alfani, which I think is like Armani for people who can't type. They almost talked me into getting a tan-plaid sport coat as well, but it was so not me that it was rejected by my very immune system. Even adding on a pair of nice pants and several nice new dress shirts, we still got out of there in the mid-three figures. More than a hundred dollars, to be sure, but not as bad as it could have been. There were a few hiccups. For one thing, I've apparently gone up a pants size, as I learned when the salesman looked at a pair of pants that I thought fit pretty good and he said were too small. I guess I've gotten used to a little constriction around the waist. But at least that explains why the dressing rooms didn't have room to lie down while I zipped up. Also, it's not always ideal to shop for big-boy clothes with a six-year-old, who was alternately clingy and wandering off, or loudly warning me that someone would steal my (smelly, ratty) shoes. But he made up for it by making charming comments like one about a violet shirt Trash was holding, "That would be a jazzy look for Dad." That was before any of us saw the label that said "Slim Fit," though. I'm happy with what I got, and more importantly, so is Trash. It wouldn't have turned out that way if I'd done my suit-shopping on my own. I would have come home saying, "But I've always wanted a purple suit! It was only sixty bucks, and look, it's reversible!" This way I have the confidence to walk into what I expect will be roomfuls of guys in ten-thousand-dollar suits and be mistaken for someone who belongs there, at least until I open my mouth. Even better, now I have enough suits to get me into my sixties, and maybe I won't even have to be buried in my brown-paper-bag polygamist suit. As for that and the other items that you may have read about above and thought that lots of less fortunate people would be grateful to have them? Well, we shall see, my friends. We shall see. posted by M. Giant 3:45 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:
"...from the Andy Bernard line of men's fashions."
By I still love that picture!
By I invest money in fashion because I'm a designer of mens suit. Needto have mindset of beauty about designs.
By Tuesday, June 21, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: Priest I didn't want to see Priest, because everyone I know who's seen it (a surprisingly large number) only went to laugh at it and make fun of it. I didn't have anyone to do this with, so that pleasure would be muted for me. And even in the theater, there were only five or six other people. All of them alone, like me. Perhaps their spouses had also insisted they go, just to be mean, like mine had. But they probably hadn't also seen the last movie in which Paul Bettany played a fallen representative of God fighting to save humanity from supernatural beasties (and to a lesser extent itself) like I had, so it seems extra unfair. I started out not minding it that much. The opening scene's pretty standard, but then there's a beautiful animated sequence setting the stage for whatever alternate, vampire-infested universe the story takes place in. Narrated by Alan Dale (who also plays a Church elder in the film), it would give HP7P1 a run for its money if there were an Oscar category for "Best Performance by an Animated Backstory." And then we're dropped into an industrial Blade Runner hellscape, with skyscrapers to the nonexistent horizon and fat cinders raining just inches past our 3-D glasses, and that's actually kind of cool. It looks like an impressively realized world, even if it doesn't hold up past the first twenty minutes. Because it turns out that here's a reality where jet-powered motorcycles that have computer dashboards coexist with hurricane lamps, gramophones, and train station masters wielding pocket watches. But even that makes more sense than the movie's physics, science, sociology, or plot. In the world of Priest, vampires are completely different from what we're used to. Instead of allegedly sexy guys with plastic teeth, they're eyeless, quadrupedal, semi-ballistic boogers with CGI fangs. So then a big revelation about a "new" kind of vampire rather loses its bite, if you'll forgive the expression, and I probably wouldn't respect you if you did. Also in the world of Priest, everyone lives under an oppressive Catholic theocracy that both keeps the populace living in fear and misery behind impregnable walls and insists that there are no more vampires. Pick one or the other, Church, but not both. That makes no sense. I did appreciate the clever casting. Besides Bettany, there's Cam Gigandet looking like Lucas Black in Legion, Stephen Moyer as a non-vampire, and Karl Urban and Brad Dourif demonstrating the bleak prospects facing third-tier Return of the King alumni. But as dumb as it was, and as much as I didn't feel like I missed anything when I went to pee before the third act, I didn't hate it as much as I expected. In fact, I'd have to say it was one of the best postapocalyptic horror/Western/martial arts/allegorical remakes of The Searchers I've ever seen. posted by M. Giant 9:15 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:Whenever I see Karl Urban in anything, I can't help but think back to when he was Cupid on Xena and laugh. (I know he played other characters on Xena, but Cupid is the one that makes me wonder if anyone looked at him back then, and thought he might be making big movies now).
By If you have a smartphone, you need the RunPee application!
By Friday, June 17, 2011 Jeopardized, Part 2 So maybe you're wondering how the Jeopardy! audition in Kansas City went, if you're not in what is apparently the large segment of my readership that has already auditioned for, been on, or won huge amounts of money from Jeopardy! in the past. I figure now is a good time to bring the other four or five of you up to speed. The drive to Kansas City the day before was mostly uneventful, save for an accident downtown that had traffic snarled so badly we saw people exiting the freeway down an on-ramp the wrong way. I went with our friend Bitter, and we practiced using a resource called What Is Quiz Book? 2 that I'd received for some long-ago Christmas and forgotten I had until Trash unearthed it minutes before we left. It was good practice for getting me into the Jeopardy! mindset, which as far as I can tell seems to involve a lot of remembering the category, being annoyed by the phrasing of the clues, and telling myself "Triple Stumper" every time I couldn't come up with the answer. There weren't enough questions in the book to keep us occupied for the whole seven-hour drive, but we also listened to a lot of NPR, which everyone knows also makes you smarter. We scouted out the hotel where the auditions were being held the evening before, so we knew the route and the parking situation and which room to go to. That morning, we had no trouble finding the right place again. As far as I could tell, neither did anyone else. The e-mail was very clear about not arriving late, or you wouldn't get in. I think the only reason that one guy was allowed in was because his flight from New Orleans that morning had been delayed. Yes, people came in from New Orleans. We were all herded into one room to pose for a Polaroid. The lady taking them immediately nicknamed me Spike, I guess because of what my hair was doing that morning (I'm currently pushing into the "Diminishing Returns" phase of my haircut life cycle). Although I'm a little embarrassed, I figure it's good to have a nickname because it'll help them remember me. Hopefully that'll override the fact that my Polaroid shows a bespectacled clown grinning down at the terrified viewer from atop a vertiginous tower of chins. There's the paperwork, and there's the "warm-up" in which the Polaroid lady proves to be in showbiz every bit as much as Alex Trebek, if not more. Those people work, man. They explain a little about how the game works, like anyone besides me doesn't already know this stuff, and then we all practice answering questions by raising our hands in lieu of buzzers. You're not supposed to signal you know the answer until they're done reading the question, you know. This seems counterintuitive for someone who's won as many games of You Don't Know Jack as I have. Then they split us up into two separate groups, each in a different room. Unfortunately, Bitter, who is a much bigger Jeopardy! fan than I am (much like almost everyone I've talked to about this), isn't allowed to spectate. Nobody is, in fact. It's very secretive. You're not going to catch me writing down any questions or answers that we were given as practice, because I think they'll be able to find me and kill me before I even post this online. So anyway, after being split into groups and doing some more practice questions and a written test (much like the online one, except I was able to go back and answer a few questions on the paper that I'd missed when they were first asked), there's the mock game, which is what I was most looking forward to. "Mock" is not really a misnomer here. There are only three questions per category, nobody keeps score, and there's no Daily Double or Double Jeopardy on the board. People are brought up in groups of three to basically take turns practicing with the buzzer. And let me tell you, that thing's trickier than it looks. You have to wait for these little "enable" lights to come on before you can buzz in. If you buzz in early, you get penalized a quarter-second. Which doesn't seem like much, but the people I was up against were buzzing in in picoseconds, seemed like. It got to the point where I was buzzing in even when I didn't know the answers, just so I could have a chance to talk. At least, that's what I told myself about the two wrong answers I gave. Don't worry, I also got a couple right. But by the time that was over I was glad nobody was keeping score. I would have been that guy with a red number on his podium for whom everyone feels pity and contempt. I think I did pretty well on the interview portion, though. Got a couple laughs plugging my book and talking about my old job at the radio show. It was hard to stand out there, though, because a lot of people showed a lot of personality. Given that my sister-in-law reacted to the news of my audition by chanting "Nerd! Nerd! Nerd!" I thought there would be a lot more duds in there with me, but that wasn't the case. After everyone got a turn, it was over, and we were released to scatter back to the various sections of the Midwest from which we hailed (people came from Minnesota to Texas, so I don't think I traveled the farthest to get there). I was back at home seven hours later. Now all I have to do is wait to be called back. Apparently the pool they're putting together now will be active for the next eighteen months, so I could hear from them any time between the end of this month and…never. They told us to keep trying, though. Lots of people do, and plenty of competitors made numerous attempts before ever getting cast, including one big winner she mentioned that I never heard of (not Ken Jennings). In fact, this was apparently not the first time for a lot of the people in there with me, because she recognized them. None of them had cool nicknames, though. Will I give it another shot if I don't get in? Probably. The online test was fun, as were the practice quizzes. Maybe next time they could have the auditions a little closer to home. I wouldn't mind going just to Des Moines or maybe Chicago or Madison next time. Kansas City's about the limit of my range for this kind of thing. Anywhere closer would be better. As long as it's not St. Paul. posted by M. Giant 8:21 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:Maybe the Polaroid thing is deliberate. Mine was so awful that I asked them to take another and they told to sit down and shut up.
By Maybe my memory is failing me as I get older but I'm almost certain that LONG ago, you _could_ ring in before Alex finished reading the question. And some people totally screwed up as a result because they didn't hear the whole clue. I'm thinking.. 1989-1991-ish?
By Monday, June 13, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: Super 8 It’s obvious watching Super 8 that J.J. Abrams deliberately set out to make the kind of movie that held him riveted when he was growing up. Fortunately, he also realized that you can’t do that. Making a late-70s/early 80s blockbuster that’s completely faithful to the period would not fly today, for various reasons (seriously, go back and watch the sail barge scene in Return of the Jedi and marvel at how slow that action seems now). Abrams did two things to being this nostalgic period piece into the present. One, he amped up the action, and two, he poured in several healthy scoops of millennial meta. And pulled off both. The action scenes are riveting and eye-popping, from an early train-derailment sequence that plays like a level of Angry Birds with freight cars to a third act of unrelenting mayhem of the kind we never saw in the 1979 this movie’s set in. There are make-you-jump moments that you don’t see coming, even after years of being trained to see them coming. As for the meta, it’s easy to comment on how this is a monster movie in which a monster movie is being made and leave it at that, but it goes further. Tween auteur Charles explains in his primitive way about how if you know as little something about a character’s emotional life you feel something when he’s in danger – something that a lot of movies have forgotten since along about 1979. But you don’t mind all this telling, because there’s also plenty of showing. These characters have backstories rooted in deep hurt that the movie doesn’t skimp on exploring. I know that this is supposed to be a homage to Spielberg (who just happens to be a producer on this, probably just so they could get the Amblin E.T. bike next to the Bad Robot), but watching these kids working on their shitty little monster movie, I kept thinking about a young director named Sam Raimi. In Bruce Campbell’s autobiography, Campbell describes scenes from his and Raimi’s youth that one imagines as being just like the ones we see here, with kids holding lights and microphones and cameras while their friends speak lines while wearing their parents’ clothes, only without being interrupted by catastrophic disasters. But then if this were an homage to Raimi, there would be shots where the camera was attached to the top of a flying train car, and quick-cut sequences where crap gets assembled, and a lot more fake blood. There would also be an ugly yellow Oldsmobile and, well, Bruce Campbell. Really, Raimi kind of gets ripped off here. But then the director isn’t the protagonist, a lowly makeup artist/lighting guy is. Maybe this has elements of autobiography in it, but I’m not sure how unless as a kid Abrams saw himself as what Raimi and his crew used to call a “Shemp.” As for the 1979 setting, at first I thought it was just naked nostalgia, but then I realized it needs to be set in a time before cell phones and the Internet and VCRs and TVs with more than five channels and video games that had more than ten pixels on the screen, and all those other things that are more interesting to today’s kids than making movies (not counting YouTube classics shot on cell phones), and when kids could just zoom around the neighborhood on their bikes without anyone caring. Alas, it also means that almost everyone and everything in the movie is distractingly hideous to behold, but I decided it’s a worthwhile trade-off. There’s some age-inappropriate behavior from the kids, like how brave they are and one scene where they sit around talking shit in a diner instead of a park somewhere and another scene where two middle-school boys argue about their feelings. And there stuff you find out at and near the end that’s a little off-putting, like how the monster is dealt with, and what it looks like (like your Uncle Steve says, you always have to produce the monster and it’s always a letdown), and the motives that trigger a lot of pretty horrible action, but the end also tells you it’s important to let go of some things so I’m going to try and do that. Finally, given the title, I have to give J.J. Abrams for not making his crew of young filmmakers number no more than six. The temptation to add exactly two more must have been almost overpowering. posted by M. Giant 10:18 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, June 10, 2011 Jeopardized I wouldn't have even known about the online Jeopardy! test back in early February if it hadn't been for all the people posting about it on Twitter. In fact I almost forgot to take it. I'd seen the warnings reminding people to sign in 15-20 minutes before it started, so when a couple of well-timed Tweets reminded me that it was only a couple of minutes away, I figured I'd better snap to it, and even then I wouldn't be surprised if I'd already blown it. The online test, in case you've never taken one, was pretty fun. You have to type in a short answer, and you have less than a minute to do it in, so Google's no help, which is as it should be. They don't give you the correct answer after you guess, or tell you which ones you got right or wrong, or even your final score, so after I was done I just forgot about it. Or tried to, at least. I knew I got at least two or three wrong for sure, and one of them in particular was going to haunt me for at least a little while. But only because the correct answer was a character in a book I was reading at the time. A quinary character, but still. Embarrassing. So I was pretty surprised when I got the e-mail telling me I'd "passed" and was being invited to a "follow-up appointment." I was also surprised to see that it was in Kansas City. Here I was thinking that my trips down to Missouri were over for the foreseeable future, and now it looks like I'm going back in just a couple of days. But for different reasons, obviously. I know it's pretty early in the process to be exhaustively chronicling some whole "My Jeopardy! Journey!" thing, but that's kind of the reason I'm doing it now. I figure there's a pretty strong chance this is as far as I'll get, so I'd better start writing about it now before the whole story ends up being "I tried to get on Jeopardy! once." There's some stuff I have to do to prepare, obviously. I have to take that day off work. I have to MapQuest the place where the appointment is going to be. They sent this letter that I have to print out and complete, with five interesting facts about myself, like I'm going to be able to come up with that many. I have to figure out where I'm spending the night before the appointment in Kansas City. Also, I have to figure out when and what time Jeopardy! is actually on. It is still on, right? It's just that I've never actually seen a whole episode, so that's something I kind of need to look into. And did you know the title's always spelled with an exclamation point? That's something I just learned. Oh, excuse me, "What is something I just learned?" Seriously? posted by M. Giant 12:41 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
Good luck!
By
I was on Jeopardy! once, back in the early 00s (season 19, aka the season before they switched away from the max 5-day winner/Ken Jennings-friendly format).
By Monday, June 06, 2011 M. Ovie Reviews: The Hangover Part II By now everyone reading this (and most people not) is aware of the rap against The Hangover Part II, which is that it's essentially a remake of the first one, with a change of setting to Bangkok and several additions of the word "again" to the screenplay. While I don't disagree with this assessment, I think the movie could have forestalled some of this criticism with a title that implied less lofty ambitions. "The Hangover Iteration II" is sufficiently unpromising. Then people would know exactly what they were getting before they got it and have lower expectations. I myself had pretty low expectations. On the other hand, I've only seen the first film once, quite some time ago, so my memories of it are slightly less fuzzy than those of our heroes. But then seeing this brought it all back again. In fact, there were so many elements repeated in the second movie that it's affected my memory of the first movie to the point where I'm not sure that stuff that only happened in the second movie didn't also happen in the first and I just don't remember. See, the thing about sequels is that they're made because when there's something successful, audiences want (and studios want to sell them) something that is, according to the old saying, "the same, but different." The trick is walking the line between how same and how different. For example, The Matrix Reloaded was too different from The Matrix because of the addition of too many new characters, settings, and sucking. The Hangover Part II, on the other hand…well, see above. But does it mean the end of the franchise? I doubt it. If Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets won't get a string of sequels axed, nothing will. I think we just need to adjust our expectations. After all, plenty of people tune in every week to a TV show with a similar premise to The Hangover's. Specifically, a group of people go haring in blind panic around an unfamiliar city on unlikely adventures, racing against time while following a tenuous trail of clues to an inexorable climax, led by a charismatic man named Phil. So if The Amazing Race can have a starting point, an airport sequence, a Detour, a Road Block, and an elimination in a different international city almost every week, why can't every version of The Hangover do the same, only with an impending wedding, a bachelor party that begins with one drink and ends with our heroes waking up in squalor and disorientation with a member of their party missing (or mostly so)? And then why can't there always be a second act in which the same three guys struggle to reconstruct the previous night, following the indelible trail of their own shocking debauchery while running afoul of the local underground and law enforcement, just to find their missing friend? And can anyone think of a decent reason why, when their best hope has turned into a dead end and Phil has to call Tracy to break the bad news (it's always Phil calling Tracy, even if that makes no sense), Stu can't always have an epiphany in the middle of the call and solve the mystery using clues that they had since five minutes after they woke up, before returning to the wedding just in time and boldly standing up to the person who's been bringing him down? And let's always have the coda in which someone comes up with a digital visual record of the night in question to play over the closing credits, and also at some point Ken Jeong jumping out at them with his tiny penis. Hey, if it works once, right? This is all making me look forward to recapping another twelve episodes of The Amazing Race in the fall. And I'm going to be the first in line for tickets to Dude, Where's My Car Now? Unrelated: We're looking for a place to put M. Edium (now six and a half) in language lessons. Any good suggestions for Twin Cities-area would-be mini-polyglots? posted by M. Giant 9:17 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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