Remember back when Adam Sandler used to be funny? This video from a recent live show is a great example, unlike pretty much any movie that he’s made in the last two decades!
Oh well – Happy Hanukkah, however you spell it… :santa:
Dream Journal : The Last Astronaut
It started off like just some sort of adult space camp, if you will – a group of about nine of us got to go up for two launches, we’d fly around in space for a bit, and then come back down … no biggie.
I was surprisingly comfortable with the whole excursion, presumably because a lot of the adventure simply consisted of sleep – we’d takeoff from Earth, fly around a bit once we settled in orbit, and then the next bit was somewhat of a blur as we’d fall asleep for a while and then wake up ready to come back home. One time before this part happened, I recall being slightly concerned about not waking up and how dangerous what we were doing really was, but soon I was out and that was that…
It wasn’t until our group got called back for another run that I learned that something was up.
It turned out that the world was in peril of … something … and we had been tasked to do … something … in order to save the world. There were still nine of us total, each with a particular reason why we had been chosen that wasn’t shared with the others.
When it was finally time for us to go, I accidentally stalled the rest of the group because I wanted a glass of orange juice – which the rest had been enjoying before boarding – but there weren’t anymore clean glasses, which was apparently really important because we had all been sterilized to go out into space, so there was a good bit of scrambling trying to find me a clean glass so that we could go. At one point the captain stood at the door to the spacecraft and shouted, “I’ll go buy him one my goddamn self!” and shortly thereafter, I had my glass and was good to go… 😕
The “sleeping” that we had endured in our previous trials was actually a test to make sure that we could survive the hypersleep required to get us to the alien world which we were traveling to – they didn’t tell us how far away it was, which I figured is never a good sign if they won’t even tell you.
By the time we awoke much, much later, we were quickly being deployed to a planet that looked remarkably like ours … because it was ours, only several hundred years in the past.
Strangely there was nobody to be found as we toured abandoned structures that looked a lot like modern shopping malls that we know today. They were a bizarre mix of modern and thick jungle, and eventually we stumbled upon this puzzle that we identified as what we had traveled all that way to solve. Nothing seemed to make much sense as we moved pieces around and placed different objects on the small altar made of stone, until one of our group was able to playback this weird, 3D rendering from the past that depicted another group like ours trying to solve the same puzzle.
What was different was that this group was very much alien, and each time that they failed, a giant ship would appear in the sky and scoop them all back up just before the world went dark, almost as if these visitors were also trying to save the world and were being evacuated just prior to the destruction setting in…
We hadn’t really thought about how we were all getting back home up until that point.
It was in watching these aliens work that we realized somehow we were off a year in when we had landed to solve the puzzle, and somehow we were able to hop back in time to find that now our offerings on the altar were at least getting a response out of the puzzle whereas before it had just remained silent.
We tried placing a couple of random things we found lying around like rocks and sticks, treating it as if it was some sort of attenuator that just needed a certain weight to trigger what it was looking for. Inexplicably, I had been carrying with me this strange, black anamorphic goo that seemed to react badly to anyone but myself – I tried placing it on the altar, but whenever I tried to back away, it turned into this really nasty bug/scorpion-thing and tried to attack anything near it, so we eventually gave up on that idea.
As everyone split up to scour the mall for items to try in the altar, I found myself in this Disney store that featured all sorts of statuettes from the movies, which didn’t really fit with the times but I wasn’t questioning in this bizarre world at that point. We all came back with armloads of things to try, all of which failed as the clock ticked closer and we kept trying to watch the 3D alien playback for more clues.
It wasn’t until I noticed something that no one else had in the video that I had a sinking feeling of how the puzzle was to be solved.
It was an altar, and altars require a sacrifice.
Somehow it wanted the strange, black goo that I carried with me, but with it only favoring me, I was going to have to stay behind to keep in under control in order for the puzzle to complete.
The dream faded out on this unexpected notion that whether the rest of the group with me could make it back themselves or not, I was going to have to stay behind to save whatever was left of my friends and family back home on modern day Earth.
2015 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 4 – Sick Christmas Humor
Been unexpectedly under the weather the last couple of days, but surprisingly I did still manage to squeeze a new humor column out of the miserable experience – with eggnog and gingerbread influences, no less!
The Immune System of a French Hen
At least if you’re one of the birds stuck in that dreadful song, you’ve got some backup in case one of your feathered friends unexpectedly comes down with the bird flu.
Adam Ruins Everything is PERFECT
I’ve watched a few random clips of this over the last couple of weeks, but I finally tracked down the full show on TruTV and I’ve got to say that I kind of love it. Adam Conover delivers a seemingly perfect blend of comedy and cynicism to correct common misconceptions that we encounter every day. Things like thinking our credit cards are secure because we sign the back of the card or that donating things for charity drives is actually productive.
The first season is actually almost over, which on the plus side means that there are TONS of clips currently available on YouTube if you’re too cheap to actually pay for a cable subscription the normal way. I’ve still got a few episodes myself to go, but here are a few more of the ones I’ve liked the best so far…
Guns
I don’t know the answer to our ridiculous mass shootings record here in America, but I don’t think I’m the only one who’s uncomfortable with just how ingrained guns have become in American culture.
It really is a cultural thing for us at this point because if you even mention talking about gun control, people go nuts about their 2nd amendment rights being infringed and how we’ve currently got 75,000 gun control laws already on the books and those ones never seem to work … people who love guns are convinced that anything but guns must be the problem, and yet the rest of us who aren’t gun nuts – and even some who are – still beg to ask the question…
…why do we have to have all of these GUNS lying around the country?!
I mean, I thought the statistic of more guns than people that I read last night was pretty alarming, but then to compound that by considering that only 40% of Americans own guns … that means that here in the United States of America, roughly 140 million people own roughly 350 million guns.
I’d love to dig even deeper into that statistic because I think it would be real telling to pull out how many of those 140 million own only one gun vs. how many of them own lots and lots of guns because just like the extremists that we observe in politics and religion and everywhere else, I’ve got a feeling there are probably a few backwoods militias jacking those numbers up quite a bit to get to the full 350 million guns owned.
And I guess the reason I say that I don’t even know the answer anymore is because although I don’t want to ban guns entirely, it frankly makes me very uncomfortable that we have almost half our population that’s this emphatic about owning these tools whose primary motive is for killing. We don’t see knife enthusiasm to this extent, and cars at least have a primary focus of transportation despite being responsible for a lot of deaths as well.
What is it about guns that so many Americans seem to fetishize to the point where we can’t even talk about them after shootings have become literally a daily headline in our nation???
I read a rather scary notion earlier today where somebody roughly said that “the war on gun control was lost after Sandy Hook” because when we weren’t able to make a dent even after a classroom of school kids got murdered in cold blood, it was already clear that America at large simply wasn’t interested in talking about its gun problem because if you ask the people carrying the guns, they’re all convinced that we don’t have one … or that it would somehow be solved if we were all carrying even more guns.
And that makes me sad because even if it was the right answer, you’ll never pull 350 million guns back off the streets of America – Donald Trump has a better chance of rounding up all of the illegal immigrants and showing them the door … all by himself.
Are the people who are pro-gun simply too in love with their weapons for America to ever shake its mass shooting stats?
It’s one of those questions that I’m not sure if we’ll ever answer until the whole thing just implodes, and yet, just under three years ago you could argue that it already did implode when 20 first graders lost their lives at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.
Since that tragedy at Sandy Hook, over 1,300 more people have been killed in over 1,000 individual shootings in the United States in the last 3 years.
That’s almost as many American soldiers who died during the war in Afghanistan, except these all happened on U.S. soil.
If another country had been responsible for so many American lives lost within our own borders, we’d have declared war three years ago, but because it’s in our own fault, and it’s about guns, instead we do nothing.
2015 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 3 – A Family Truckster Realization
So I noticed something interesting late this evening while I was watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation whilst buried under a mountain of kleenex. I’d never really thought much about it before because it’s really only featured in the opening scene, but the Family Truckster – the iconic mode of transport that takes the family to Wally World in the first Vacation movie – isn’t actually the same car as the one in the first movie!
Now maybe this is completely intentional, but because I’ve got plenty of cough syrup coursing through my veins *I* thought it was an interesting, fun little fact. And granted, the movies themselves were released 6 years apart, so it could be argued that of course it’s a new car, although it seems like my own family growing up milked our family Oldsmobile for far longer than that.
PLUS!!!
The Truckster that made its cameo in this year’s Vacation sequel in fact was the original car, or at least one that looked a lot like it, so … that!
Anyways, here’s the original…
And here’s the version from Christmas Vacation, which appears to just be some sort of Ford Taurus painted to resemble the unmatchable Family Truckster…
I tell you, it really broke the continuity for me to see all of those sleek and sexy curves of the Taurus in place of the blocky, ton of bricks-exterior that the original Truckster was known for. Ok, so not really, but cough syrup will do strange things to a man, so frankly you’re lucky your even getting advent blog posts at all right now!
♫ Holiday ro-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ad, holiday ro-o-o-o-o-o-ad… ♫
2015 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 2 – Scott’s Top 5 Christmas Movies
Not to be confused with Scott’s Top 5 Christmas Specials which we’ll be covering a little later on this month, this is a list that changes quite frequently … in fact, I’ll probably have changed my mind by the time I’m finished writing this … but for the time being, these are the holiday movies that I’m banking on for this holiday season because, well, bleh I’m sick and there’s a good chance I’ll probably be watching every single one of them over the next couple of days… 😛
- National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation – Clark W. Griswold is America’s everyman and if there’s a person who can’t relate to Chevy Chase’s iconic character who just wants the perfect Christmas, well chances are that’s because they’re really one of the obnoxious relatives making it tougher for the rest of us…
- A Christmas Story – I honestly used to kind of hate this movie, admittedly before I ever really sat down and watched it, but now much like Christmas Vacation, I can recognize it as the true timeless classic that it really is.
- A Muppet Family Christmas – Quite possibly the best Muppet movie ever, this snowed-in treasure has a great sing-a-long soundtrack, includes just about every character from the Muppet universe, and even features a swell cameo from Jim Henson himself doing the dishes with Sprocket at the end!
- Die Hard – Seriously, the only thing this jolly, old holiday tale is missing is John McClane running around Nakatomi Plaza wearing a Santa hat while he’s mowing down terrorists the American way. It’s got Christmas music, the phrase “ho ho ho” is prominently featured – what more could an elf need?!
- Home Alone – This was pretty much the perfect kids movie because it first came out when I was 10 years old myself. And that Christmas I dreamed of stopping burglars with my Micro-Machines and throwing paint cans off the banister at intruders, all because my stupid uncle ate the cheese pizza that Dad bought especially for me. Christmas.
2015 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 1 – Family Photos!
It’s that time again!
If you’re anything like me, 2015 just sort of flew by entirely too fast and you’re probably expecting the month of December to do the same. Luckily we ended up starting a bit early by actually getting our holiday photos done the week before Thanksgiving … a feat that required me putting the Christmas tree up at 3:00am the night before, but was ultimately worth it from a time management perspective. 😉
Anywho, here are some of my favorites…
Props to Sweet Cheek Photography for the great memories! It’s kind of crazy to compare these to the ones we had taken at Christmastime only a year ago to see how big Christopher has grown in the last year – little guy will be making the ladies swoon on the playground in no time… 😀
movie thoughts … The Peanuts Movie
Tonight we took Christopher to see his second movie in the theater, and overall I think he really liked it.
For what it’s worth, I really liked it, too!
Unlike a certain unnamed lasagna-loving cat’s recent movies that were pretty much awful, The Peanuts Movie did a great job of keeping the spirit of the characters that we’ve come to know and love from the likes of A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown while also introducing a new style as the first look at the Peanuts gang via CGI.
I loved a number of the callbacks throughout the film, though I think the scenes featuring Snoopy vs. the Red Baron where we’d periodically see his surroundings in real life amid the fantasy were my favorite.
Sara noted that Christopher himself seemed to take a particular liking to Woodstock and his own little antics, so that was kind of neat!
A lot of times I have a hard time getting into non-Disney animated movies just because Disney and Pixar have done such a great job of setting the bar so high, but they really did a good job with this one from start to finish and now in hindsight, I think I can say that the scads of Peanuts merchandise that I was inundated with while Christmas shopping over the weekend is well warranted indeed. 😉
Super cute movie, very much true to the spirit of the late Charles Schulz, and a great way to introduce a new generation to an old favorite.
Loved the end credits, too … the football almost had me tearing up as I was grinning ear to ear!!!
Dream Journal : Escaping a War Zone
It started with a plane crash that should’ve killed me, but didn’t.
I was on a work trip when the passenger jet that we were flying basically started falling apart, and the next thing I knew we were looking out the side of the plane that was no longer plane as the ground around us was rapidly approaching.
I have no idea how I survived, but a lot of people actually did. We were all sitting around the wreckage of this jumbo jet trying to make sense of it when I noticed that my phone was still intact and I was receiving frantic messages from a co-worker about what had happened. The news was talking about a plane being shot down over Afghanistan and how there were no survivors, even though it had literally just happened … after piecing a few things together quickly on the phone, I told her that they couldn’t tell anyone that we’d survived and turned my phone to silent before we started to run…
The group was already much smaller as we found ourselves hiding in the middle of a war torn city, suddenly painfully aware that we’d crashed in pretty much the worst possible place ever as we saw men carrying machine guns walking the streets nearby, though so far it didn’t seem that they were aware of our presence … yet. At the moment at least we were more or less invisible amid this chaos, whereas we knew that if they realized there were survivors we would quickly become the hunted.
Sneaking from building to building without much direction, it didn’t take long for one of our members to slip up and attract the attention that put us running for our lives, our numbers quickly dwindling as the gunfire gradually picked off our stragglers who we didn’t even have time to look back and acknowledge as we fled. Eventually I ended up alone, darting between houses in an almost suburban setting as I felt the chase somewhat slowing behind me until I was able to hide in a farmer’s field while I could overhear the soldiers wandering around nearby, but thankfully without a clue that one of their prospects was laying among the tall crops so close nearby.
It was in that field that I stayed for nearly a week, slowly inching my way further from the man’s house whenever the quiet encouraged me to move forward, sustaining myself on whatever I could find nearby on the ground that was mostly disgusting – a few of the crops that surrounded me, but also some bugs and even dirt. I hadn’t used my phone in days after turning it off upon overhearing one soldier commenting that they’d been tracking us via GPS, and I knew it just wasn’t worth the risk when already they were so close on the roads that bordered the fields that kept me hidden.
I finally had to make haste once again when it was the farmer itself who caught sight of me during his daily chores and quickly alerted the nearby soldiers – only a couple this time – who pursued me on foot as I proceeded to steal his car in return and take off back into the city that I’d just spent so much time trying to escape.
I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going – all I knew was that I had to get away.