Testing.

Picture 011

Picture 011
Originally uploaded by Jesse Noonan.

This is an actual manual test post from blah blah blah

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Man, I totally suck at blogging.

I'm sitting here watching the power outage on CNN while also watching the extremely vile trailer for Ichi the Killer (I'm not linking the trailer, cause, seriously, it's really vile. I had to cover my eyes twice.) and anyway, I'm listening to CNN, and I think to myself "hey, OUR power isn't out, is it?"

I'm not smart.

OK, new feature. New feature, as in, it's something new that I'm going to be doing, and also as in, having features is, in itself, new.

The Batshit-Crazy Book of the Day

The What Would Jesus Eat Cookbook :
From an Amazon.com review:
"To begin with, I agree completely with the premise of "What Would Jesus Eat?"--that the Levitical dietary laws were provided for health reasons and that they are completely relevant for today (they do not return the Christian to a 'yoke of bondage' as some reviewers have charged.)"

I'm going to refrain from commenting on these myself. I will choose a quote either from the book itself or from a review or the publisher's marketing. I figure if I have to comment on it to point out the craziness, it's just not crazy enough.

I will try to avoid mining vanity publishers' websites for crazy-ness. But, I mean, who am I kidding? That ain't gonna last. Those things are full of bad, bad craziness. Like this person who apparently channeled both a Chris Ware character and something with a name that sounds like an early 90s girl R&B group.

So I watched this movie called Stranded last night. It had Fuckin' Vincent Gallo in it. And that pretty much covers it. But not quite. After about an hour and a half of Being Exactly What You'd Expect A Low-Budget Spanish Movie About A Doomed Mission To Mars Starring Vincent Gallo To Be, there's one great scene wherein The Guy That You Always Knew Was Gonna Die Because He's Likable looks up at Phobos and Deimos and says something about dying "under the Moons of Barsoom." Then he has a great li'l soliloquy about his grandfather's Edgar Rice Burroughs books; the John Carter of Mars books were his favorites.

Made me think it was a French movie for a while. Cause, y'know. And also cause the French seem to really love early science fiction. Just ask these guys.

You just don't often see people talking about books in movies. Hell, you don't often see people in movies talking about any kind of art influencing them. So, worth it for that, I guess. The rest was deadly boring, though. Some "Cold Equations" rehash and a bunch of Vincent Gallo being abrasive, unconvincingly delivering scientific mumbletypeg and getting names wrong, and then the old Ancient Lost Technology Deus Ex Machina.

Arnold, Squirrelsicles

I watched Terminator 2 with my parents tonight. Actually, we watched the first half last night and finished it tonight. Because it's insanely long.

My opinion of it is still the same. It's pretty good. I like Joe Morton. I like nuclear weapons. Don't so much like the embarrassing "kid teaches machine how to be hep" scenes or the embarrassing "whaat's wrong with your eyesss?," robot-learns-to-feel stuff.

What I really like is that it's the only sequel I can think of that has it's characters genuinely, profoundly fucked-up by the events of the first movie. In most sequels, status quo has returned and our heroes are living the life they earned at the end of their last adventure. In T2, all the blowing-up and shooting and time-travelling from the first one has actually broken lives and damaged people severely. Which is cool. Gives it a little resonance. A little.

Actually now that I think about it, Aliens had the same kinda action going. Ripley was fucked up, but she shakes it off so early in the film...

The other important thing about T2: Liquid Nitrogen is the badass-est stuff, like, ever. Man, I like that stuff. I once had some warts burned off with it. That was cool. At Penn State, behind one of the buildings where I never went to class, there was a big tank of it. The campus legend was that grad students who had access to it would catch squirrels and dip them in it (dangling them by their scroungy little tails, natch) and then smash them into squirrel brittle. I may be making that up. But I don't think so. I think somebody else made it up and then told me.

Perfect Car Stereo Moment

Pulled into the parking lot at home with the Bad Plus' cover of Aphex Twin's "Flim, " perfect summery happy-robot jingling; heat-lightning north past the mountain, first firefly of summer blinks about fifteen feet up, off to my right front- while the song ends I watch him trail across the street, climb above the neighbor's house. Like with fresh snow, makes me ignore the road for a minute, the yards, like these aren't suburbs, but wild.