Here we go here we go here we go. I'm gonna pull a stone-age on this one, i'm only going to bring a phone and my camera, AND NOTHING ELSE. This'll be interesting, really. I don't even think i can do it.  I really hope, on the plane, that i'll be able to watch the Shaggy Dog again, because i swear to god, westbound to hawaii, Shaggy Dog, month later, eastbound to continent, Shaggy Dog again.  The people must love Tim Allen.

I'm going to buy a little red book. You bet your ass.

Anyway, g'bye folks, see you all in 10 days, after i have conquered some stupid great wall. See you all on the mainland.

As it hits up into the 100's this past week on average, the Seville Classics rotating tower fan has become my lover and best friend. And saviour. Praise be to technology!

So...i was up until 2 am last night watching the end of the HBO-BBC series Rome (the one HBO Legal in New York contacted me about, you remember, the one that said Cease and Desist for "taking" an episode off the internets via torrent), and i gotta say, holy fucking shit that show is SO hardcore.  There is more sex, gore, violence, swearing, and overall Roman behavior than everything on television combined. Like wow.

Also, the dropping of my Xbox 360 from an airport platform evidently messed up the harddrive on it, which puts the tally of Nelson's Broken Hard-drives at about 3. or 4. I lost count, it's become such a regular occurence that the cake i get to celebrate each one has become to taste so very boring and stale. Effing-A, now i have to buy another hd for like a hundred something bucks. Whoopty doo!

In the past 48 hours, I have spent probably 5 of them watching movies. One with the lovely Miss Mitchell and the other with the brilliant Miss Lee. The two movies in question? Why, they're The Devil Wears Prada and Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest, respectively!

The Devil Wears Prada
I never thought i'd see the day where i would use 'Meryl Streep' and 'delicious' in the same sentence, but here it goes: Meryl Streep performed deliciously in this film, or to be more succinct, Meryl Streep was delicious. She made this movie for me, and without her uber, chilly Cruella DeVille, i would have been disappointed, but instead i came out feeling i had seen a tolerable, "cute" little romcom. Oh yeah, her and Tucci. I love me some Stanley Tucci.

Anne Hathaway, whom everybody calls "fatty", perpetrates the whole 21st century, urban Cinderella plot, becomes a princess (ohhhh snap! she was in princess diaries!!!1) in the process, only to throw it all away after she sees what a monster her career has made her. Gee, didn't see that one coming. What i found most intriguing wasn't the predictable and happy-go-lucky denouemont, but the climax, the little conversation between Anne's...Andy and Streep's Miranda. That shit was tight, and Streep was delicious.

Pirates (the rest of the title is far too long)
In a word, entertaining. In three words, entertaining and LONG-AS-HELL This badboy clocks in at two hours, thirty minutes. After countless scenes of KRAKEN!!! i found myself peering at the ol' timepiece one too many times, which is never a good sign. Maybe my 12 year-old a.d.d. self had a lapse of existence, or maybe i'm just cranky and hot, but i wanted the damn thing to end. Get with the plotsing, the actioning, and setting-up-itty of the third one...ness. I can't wait for Chow Yun-Fat to pull out two beretta's in the third movie after he walks out on deck, and all these doves fly out of the cargo hold, spit out his cigarette and go foosh foosh foosh kchow kchow! slow motion off the side of the boat as it explodes when a speedboat flies through the pirate ship. Hell yes.

*Ahem* I digress. While i enjoyed the second film more than the first, and i understand that i'm in the minority with this opinion, i will assert that there were, in fact, too many sideplots. A sideplot for every character it seemed! Why would anyone even care about the main story anymore when one has to worry about all the periphery goings-on AND expect said plotline to genuinely resolve and provide catharsis knowing the existence of the third film? I completely just stopped caring about what happened, knowing i would have to wait another 10 months before i could be satisfied or get any real answers.

And just to ruin this film for the unlucky few who actually read this blog, what the hell is up with the dead guy from the first one (Rush) coming back at the end of the second one? What the fuck is up with that? Anyway, go see this movie if you like pirates, and standard Bruckheimer explosive affairs. This is like THE ultimate popcorn summer movie, and go see it if you want to see Keira Knightley being a general bitch to people, Orlando Bloom looking womanly, and Depp being...Sparrow-y. Oh yes, there's also a love triangle, which works out great because a lot of the people's hats in this movie are, strangely enough, shaped like triangles. Weird, huh? First film was tighter overall, second felt all loosey-goosey and lame-like.

i stand by my statement that a genuine, serious Ninja film should be made to counter this pirate-fever. Nay, a trilogy of genuine, serious, legit ninja films. Ninjas > Pirates > Cowboys, this is the law of the universe.

On a seperate but relatead note, i embark upon the journey of watching the Magnificent Seven as we speak, when i should be packing for the actual, physical journey of the morrow to Beijing (oh, how i love the lulling drone of the Pratt and Whitney JT9D engines, like a mother's soothing songs) or retrofitting ol' ironsides and bringing the gen 4 iPod out of retirement. Because some fucker smashed my rear window in the city and boosted my laptop bag, the contents of which included my iPod with video, which i was borrowing from my dad. Yikes.

In happier news, i just got me this:

I love the Bay Area, but good lord it is as hot as Hades's arsehole.  It's barely 9 AM and its already like in the high 70's...this is unacceptable.  Something is afoot when it's cooler near the equator than up here in Cali.

but remember, its NOT global warming. psh, don't be such an alarmist.

I make awesome nachos.


So it was a lie, it's not a quick note. On a completely unrelated and more calamitous note and on Lebanon:
So...we're just going to let Israel continue to pound the shit out of Lebanon? We're going to let them clear out the entire area of any Hezbollah threat even if that means killing hundreds, if not thousands, of civillians? Right.

That's the bitter medicine that will make everyone all smiles 5, 10, 15 years from now...not that ceasefire that Secretary of State Rice seemed to dismiss. Some kid loses his sister, mother, and father when a laser-guided, American-made smart bomb lands on his house, we expect him to grow up to love democracy and be tolerant and not be anti-semitic and anti-american? Am I missing something here? Letting one country beat the crap out of the other is supposed to stabilize a rapidly deteriorating region how, exactly?

And Hezbollah, what stupid fucks. No western power is ever going to negotiate with terrorists, no matter the demands. They could have taken those soldiers in exchange for some of my nachoes, it wouldn't have mattered. Kidnapping those two IDF soldiers was the stupidest thing they could have possibly done, and now they've brought down the self-righteous hellfire and brimstone of F-15E fighters and M1A1 tanks. Raining Iranian rockets onto Haifa really seems to strengthen their argument there.

Do any of these parties realize that the more death and destruction dealt now will only bite everyone's asses in the future? Extremism is bred, born, and festers in this environment. Israel hits hard, civillians either hate Hezbollah for bringing this upon them or hate Israel for being so heavy handed. Hezbollah/Terrorists retaliate and blow up communities, those survivors become more right-leaning and hawks. Pattern here?

/rant off

I had a great Lost moment though. Turns out, our house "beeps" whenever the power goes out (strangely enough) courtesey of these badboys.
Every four seconds. 1...2...3...4...OMINOUS BEEP...1...2...3...It's like there's two minutes winding down and somebody's gotta push that button! Unfortunately, the house here did not come with a previous tenant with a thick Scottish and Peruvian accent calling everyone "brother".

Yes, i am that geeky and hopeless.

So good news everybody, Peter Cullen is the voice of Optimus Prime in Michael Bay's yet-to-be hackery called Transformers. Peter Cullen's claim to fame? Voicing Optimus Prime in the original Transformers cartoons. Can I hear a hell yeah?! Tellin ya, all that needs to be done is a Spielberg-helmed live-action GI Joe movie to complete the trifecta of childhood IPs gone through the time machine to paint a fat, stupid grin on my face as an adult. (Joining TMNT and Transformers)

T-minus 8ish hours until one hellish flight. I'm hyped.

Finally. About freaking time.

I get to return to *really really* sunny and hot, so i hear, California. You know something's afoot when it's hotter there than here. And i'm the one closer to the equator. So looking forward to home and this J5 concert at the Fillmore, not looking forward to the redeye flight and the heat. Check.

This parking fiasco is making me depressed. Seriously, there's like no work-around i can currently concoct for this. It will take some sort of bureacratic derring-do and genius to even imagine a solution. Damn.

Pictures from a few weeks ago when the Chen clan wined and dined with the Mitchell tribe at the Plantation Clubhouse (delicious, delicious food.) I want you to look hard for a common theme among clothing, especially the Chen males







Link of the day:
The photorgraphy of Trey Ratcliff, some guy in Texas who travels everywhere and takes amazing shots of things and HDRizes them (high dynamic range imaging)

Wow, another day, another series of non-events.  I guess i could write about how fucked up everything is right now in the world, here at home as well as over there in the Middle East, but I'm very tired.  Perhaps tomorrow when i'm in ranting spirits.  

Just two more days.  Two more days and I get to go home for a blink of an eye before I have to go to China with my family for another 10 days.  Still no word on the parking situation, and I'm starting to get worried about that...

Link of the day:
The Show with Zefrank.

This comes from the Lost Episodes (ugh, mixed feelings about this), but this is just so amazing and clearly Chappelle at his best:

MSN Space security Nazi's Don't Like YouTube? Chappelle Gives Pac Love.

Materials to design a putting green for your home: $65
Twenty square yards of astroturf: $215
Plastic flags: $45
An expensive nike-branded putter: $115

Four consecutive putting contest titles and rubbing it in the losers' faces: Priceless.

All seriousness aside, i got completely owned today by the USC Transporation people. wing. agency? division. Division. Surprise, surprise, if you register a vehicle in mid-July to attempt to obtain some form of parking close to your housing for next year, don't expect a DAMN thing! Everything will be sold out and the webpage text provided will be condescending and actually laugh at you. No joke. I got boned.  I got boned big time.

Wow. Yet another reason to blog with yet another personal web-page. My MSN Space is two terms too familiar with yet another place that has a blog, and many of the same features, with more sexual predators, models, pedophiles, pre-pubescent girls and bands wanting to be your friend.

But I like this place, this space. It gives me things i can't do on myspace, like the ability to create really neat lists! I can see how the creative team meeting went, and the genesis of such a feature:

Team member 1: All right, what's cool, what's "hip" these days? What do kids want?
Team member 2: Well our information here says the age bracket of 18-30 somethings love to create lists, imposing order and structure to their lives by randomly compiling information. By taking items like mountain biking, ipod, porno, Dane Cook, Sufjan Stevens into a list, they become immediately pertinent and hip. Young people love lists, it's just that simple.
Team member 1: ...you, my friend, are a genius. Get on it now.

All sarcasm aside, the eventual integration of all things Microsoft is something to marvel at, through Windows Live/Live Anywhere/Xbox Live. Am i one of the only ones looking forward to Windows Vista? There's certainly a lot of Live and a lot to love. Anyway, this is my blog, this is the christening, the veritable "champagne-shatter-to-the-bow" of the internetical ship, and I just got shards of metaphorical glass buried into my face and arms.