An email to some friends

I was bored at work the other day, I decided to send off this email to some friends. It's original title:

Kids: Stay in School, Don't Drink "Mochaspressos"

Normally, I make coffee in my office. Today, however, the hard water of DC has clogged my high tech $12 one-cup coffee maker, forcing me to employ my degree in chemistry and brew a few rounds of vinegar. Since I find the flvaor and body of warm vinegar to be less fulfilling than coffee, I turned to the Behemoth of Brew - the 4-foot tall automated coffee machine in our office's galley. This amazing contraption can fire out coffee, hot water, or hot chocolate and only requires a user to hit some buttons and place a cup or mug in a well-marked area near the device's bottom ($10 for whomever can use that last phrase in a joke in the next 24 hours).

Normally, I hit this beast up for coffee. However, experience dictates that the Behemoth's coffee comes with a 90% chance of excruciating abdominal pain and the desire to slice into one's own appendages within 3 hours of ingestion. So, I turned to the hot chocolate, which is much gentler on the GI tract and probably packed with enough sugar to make a 6 year old's head explode. Just before I depressed the "dispense" button, I got a wacky idea. The Behemoth, being made in America, is all about choice. You don't have to pick from JUST coffee, or hot water, or hot chocolate - you can COMBINE any of them! You can get an espresso (concentrated coffee), you can get an americano (concentrated coffee with water), you can get an extra strong coffee (more coffee, less water), or...you can have a MOCHASPRESSO (strong coffee AND hot chocolate). i figured that this would be a great compromise - all the sugar of a hot chocolate, all the caffeine of a coffee, and a heightened chance of avoiding an incident that may require a change of pants before Noon.

So, I gave it a try. While it was delicious at first, I soon realized that I was wrestling with a force greater than I could handle. The sugar and caffeine had combined in that maniacal machine to produce a toxic hallucinogenic that my poor nervous system had not seen before (which is saying something). Within an hour I was mesmerized by how my wall calendar had transformed into a kaleidoscope of pastels, how my computer screen started to sing showtoons, and how my desk's surface became covered with small ants that spoke to each other in French.

Bottom line - Mochaespressos are drugs. Keep that shit away from kids.

I really hope that you guys can avoid the temptation to mix hot beverages with such detrimental consequences.

I have to get going, since there are some dragons in my office that are taunting me.

Have a blessed day,

Riding a bus in Seattle on Sept. 27, 2010

(I wrote this a few weeks ago while visiting Seattle - it always takes me a while to post)

As a long-time resident of Seattle, I relied on the bus to get me to the University on a relatively frequent basis. Although I always preferred the bike commute, I was not a fan of pedaling during the “dark days” of late fall and early winter, when daylight was gone by 5pm. Thus, I often found myself on the bus heading to and from school.

I’ll be first to admit that such rides were often unpleasant. The bus moves at the pace of an old woman on a Lark scooter, carefully checking and re-checking the prices of every single item in Aisle 5 at the grocery store. The bus’s route crossed a large swatch of North Seattle, connecting soup kitchens run by various churches and charity organizations to cheap dive bars to prime pan-handling zones near the University. Thus, it had its share of patrons that enjoyed drinking malt beverages out of paper bags and/or emptying the contents of their bowels or bladder while in-transit. Combined with the inattention to grooming exhibited by many of my graduate student colleagues that were also passengers, the bus developed a complex and rich aroma that brought about feelings of desperation, loathing, and cynicism which could be termed “the malaise of the number 44 bus.”

(Above: Typical 44 bus. Heavily-laden bike on the front is equally likely to belong to a grad student or a drunken bum.)

Now that I live in Washington, DC, my commuting experience is quite different. I ride the Metro. It is spotlessly clean, as food and drink are outlawed. Periodically, a teenager who has chosen to defy this rule will be arrested in a rather public manner and the story will be conspicuously spread to the local press as a means of “sending a message.” Riders represent a wide cross section of the city – politicos in suits, beaten-down civil servants clad in ill-fitting, outdated khakis and glasses repaired with tape, working moms taking their kids to day-care, teenagers en route to school that listen to music, speak in loud voices as they seek attention from those around them, and text each other with violent movements of their phalanges, usually in simultaneous fashion.

Although I enjoy the diverse cross-section of riders in DC, as well as the attention to speed (as long as there are no track repairs, in which case the Metro is rendered as fast as a large horse-and-buggy, where the horses are only 3-legged) and cleanliness, I am somewhat nostalgic for the #44 bus in Seattle. It may not have been efficient or glamorous, but its grittiness was consistent (there was never a “nice ride” on the 44) and created a slight sense of proletarian solidarity among those of us without cars or without to desire to commute by car. (In a way, it was the nirvana of urban hipster-dom, toward which I must guiltily admit to sharing some sympathy.)

Sitting in an Airline Terminal Gate (again) - an interlude

It’s somewhat difficult to compose creative prose while sitting in an airport, especially at 3:30pm on a Friday. Although it’s not overwhelmingly loud in my particular gate, there is a collective fatigue in the air – a feeling that the work week has finally triumphed. The soon-to-be passengers are like marathon runners cresting the final hill at mile 25 (not that I’ve run a marathon or have any desire to do so), exhaling, comforting themselves by the idea that they have almost achieved their goal, yet knowing that there is still a last lonely push to the finish line. Or something like that.

A Movie Review GI JOE: The Rise of Cobra

This film has been widely panned by many well-respected critics. I find this supposed conventional wisdom shameful. Although I acknowledge many shortcomings in this movie, there are some redeeming features for the aficionados of Hasbro’s iconoclastic line of toys. So, here it goes:

Disclaimer: My friend and I took in GI Joe at 1pm on a Thursday, both avoiding the crowds and any tasks that might have been expected of us at what is colloquially known as our “day jobs.” To celebrate the matinee experience, we also smuggled in multiple airplane bottles of hooch.

PROS

The re-creation of the GI Joe vehicles is totally sweet. They use every excuse possible to exhibit a variety of the uber-fantastic choppers, jets, jeeps, ships, snow mobiles, submarines, et al. that made the toys and the old cartoon so enjoyable. Of course, such diversity in equipment requires equally diverse settings – high-altitude dogfighting, undersea naval battles, treks across the arctic tundra or the vast empty desert. Note – as a viewer, do not try to understand or connect the requisite and rapid changes in settings that pervade the film. It will make you unhappy and possible sleepy. Please shut up and admire the hardware. Corollary note – there are other instances throughout the film where normal postulates of physics are ignored. One example (SPOILER ALERT) involves the sinking of large chunks of Arctic ice. Again, do not try to ask “In what universe does ice not float?” Besides, the answer is pretty simple – “In the universe where a self-imposed mute named Snake Eyes can cut something with a sword and it

is forced to explode.”

Chick fighting. So this is really the best part of the movie. But in a desire to avoid insensitivity, or worse, outright misogyny, I’ve decided to list it second. But, let’s be clear, it’s demotion is purely political.

First, it must be said that Scarlett is very very hot. That is, she is hot if you find red heads that wear skin-tight athletic gear while carrying heavy weaponry hot.

Second, while my film-going compatriot disagrees with me, I would go further and claim that Scarlett’s hotness is eclipsed (barely, but eclipsed nonetheless) by the surface-of-the-Sun hotness of the Baroness. The Baroness gets the nod for several reasons: (1) Black leather. If her outfit doesn’t pique your interest, go steal your Dad’s Viagra. (2) With the exception of a brief backstory foray, the Baroness is BAD. Not like Michael Jackson bad. More like a Catholic high school girl who just got into her parent’s liquor cabinet and is about to make an ex-boyfriend very jealous bad. Maybe I’m just more of a fan of Ginger than Maryanne, or maybe I have some latent tendencies for dead cow and/or the biker-bondage. Getting to the bottom of that desire is for another entry.

Stormshadow and Snake Eyes actually have multiple awesome ninja battles

(If you don’t know who those guys are, please don’t bother to see this fine film or continue reading this post.)

Although it’s clear that both are ninjas (meaning that they can flip out and kill shit ALL THE TIME; see realultimatepower.net for details) and as such they are the best fighters of Cobra and the Joes, respectively, they would rarely, if ever face off in the cartoon series. Yes, there would be chase scenes, Stormshadow would utter some “fightin’ words,” and the pace of the music would likely quicken – yet they would never actually fight. This was truly a tease – an animated blueball, if you like.

However, the movie is nowhere near as coy. Stormshadow and Snake Eyes not only square off several times in the present, but the fight as children as part of a backstory flashback. They adequately use cool ninja weapons, the scenes last for a ridiculously long amount of time, and other side characters do not interfere with the elegant and deadly dance between these two radical ninjas.

CONS

Dennis Quaid – really? The best you could get for Duke was Quaid? Oh, how the mighty have fallen since the 1986’s triumph of Innerspace.

Channing Tatum - Quaid’s contribution to the movie is only marginally better than the truly horrific acting on the part of Channing Tatum. There’s something about Tatum that reminds me of Eric Nies from the first season of the Real World, who represents the archetypical d-bag for all subsequent reality television shows. I realize that the movie needs a relatively good looking and buff male lead, but this movie also needed a leading dude with some ability to carry a joke. I’m not asking for Stephen Colbert or John Stewart, but Tatum’s inability to convey humor is a real downer – it’s truly a missed opportunity. In the pauses between awesome action scenes that defy the laws of common sense and physics (e.g., ice does not float; although the GI Joe “secret” base gets infiltrated and attacked, they continue to use it; apparently, secret bases must take a while to construct) it can be really hilarious.

OVERALL

As much as I enjoyed this movie, I can’t quite give this a “must-see” status. For maximum enjoyment, it requires a certain amount of prior cult knowledge on the part of the viewer and a sufficient quantity of spiked carbonated beverages. That being said, the chick-fighting is unparalleled. So, I give this the, “Highly encouraged for drunk guys at matinee prices” rating.