Worldly Thoughts and More Robertson's Reviews

After not posting in a couple days I had some thoughts today at work that I felt I would put into to words to see what everyone else thinks.

First I'm getting sorta tired of these murmurs that we should boycott the upcoming Olympics in China. Just think if you were an athlete at the top of your game and you were chosen to represent your country in the Olympic games only to have your country back out in protest. Its not fair at all to the athletes and honestly no one really cares about Tibet. Its a callous thing to say but its the truth. People act like they are outraged with the whole Tibet situation so they will appear to be a worldly humanitarian and then in the next breath they will buy all the Chinese made goods they possibly can. Damn hypocritical yuppies. Don't take your political correctness out on some kids that just want to do their country proud and run their little hearts out.

Another thing that bothers me is the other controversy about the newest Vogue cover. I don't read Vogue, I don't know what its about, probably fashion or something. But this story is all over the place about how racist the cover is. On the cover is Labron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers with his tongue out dribbling a basketball with his other armed wrapped around the waist of Giselle Bunchen. The writers who think the world should be in a tizzy over this crap feel that it makes Labron look like King Kong, thus like a monkey, and thus is apparently an obvious racial slap in the face to African Americans everywhere. The problem is no one else thinks so. I had to chuckle at the pole beside the article called "Why you should be offended" in which 87% of people who voted, aren't. Way to go chief.

Also on a humorous front, I read an article today saying the Oliver Stone had finished casting for a documentary on George W Bush. Now I like Bush, he seems like a nice guy, but Josh Brolin as George W Bush? Riiiiiiiight.

And now with the reviews:

No Country for Old Men: Josh Brolin(weird coincidence) plays a all around tough guy who comes across a suitcase full of money and gets stalked by a psycho killer(Javier Barbem) while Tommy Lee Jones tries to figure out the whole thing and stop the craziness. This movie is really one of the best I've seen in years. I'm not just saying this because it did so well in the awards, but it really is a great, well written, entertaining movie. The suspense is offset by the fantastic hilarious banter of Tommy Lee Jones' character into something that's really a joy to watch. Javier Bardem's character could go down in movie history as being one of the best villains of all time. I'm going to have to give it a 5 out of 5.

Revolver: Jason Statham plays an ex-con who has learned the secret to winning at everything, but his life is suddenly upended when he gets drug into a plan to take down his former Las Vegas casino boss. I was beginning to think that this movie would never come out in America. I saw this movie a while ago and for some reason it never hit theaters(at least widely) in the US. I love the other Guy Ritchie movies, Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and this movie adds a certain intellectual quality to his previous formula. While I think it doesn't quite hum on all cylinders and he perhaps missed on precisely expressing the message that he wanted to say. The movie sometimes flies so fast that explanations on what is happening are replaced with loud sound effects, a Ritchie recurring element, it hurts this movie more than his others. Its a decent flick and worth checking out. I give it a 4 out of 5.

Wristcutters: Patrick Fugit plays a guy who is so torn up by his girlfriend leaving him that he decides to kill himself. However he ends up in this world much like the one he left, inhabited with all the other suicides. When he hears that his ex has killed herself as well, he goes on a voyage in this wacky world to find her with the help of a Russian rocker and a hitchhiking Shannyn Sossamon (super hot). From the description this movie seems like it would be very much a depressing drama about suicide, but its actually a very very good comedy. From the quirky characters to the random occurrences that happen from time to time, this movie is fantastic. Also there's something about Shannyn Sossamon that I've always found to be mesmerizing. So so hot. Check it out. I give it a 4 out of 5.

Thats it for now, let me know if you want me to check out and review anything else

Limbo

OK this is a kinda existential post but I kinda wondered if anyone else felt this way (or at least any of the few that read this blog).

I sorta feel sometimes like I'm kinda in limbo. Not a bad monotonous limbo. I have a nice apartment, good car, a job I like, and great friends but it seems like things are pretty much the same day in and out and I sorta feel like I'm bound for something better. Like its right around the corner and I just need to be patient a little bit more for it to get here. Now I don't know what this thing is but I just get this weird feeling sometimes that something good is coming.

I dunno this may be a bunch of garbage but tell me what you think.

I wonder.....

If you add two Hamburger Helpers together, are you helping or hindering the hamburger?

Which came first boiling or broiling, and were they by the same guy or did someone rip someone off?

Do some girls not realize that they cant put on makeup well? I mean stop really, you looked fine without, sometimes its really bad.

What stinks to fish?

Why girls think that guys are difficult to understand, and then when listing off the things that girls like to try to prove their point, they go on for ten minutes and somehow weave world peace and ponies into it?

How exactly you would protest a speeding ticket in court?

Do the people on SmashLab really have scientific degrees or did they just get four stupid people together and tell them to come up with unrealistic methods to solve problems?

Are kids as happy with the happy meal if you take out the fries and give them apples instead?

How the one chick on the treadmill tonight doesnt die running with three layers on, besides the fact that she goes to the gym to not run on the treadmill?

How smart is Alex Trebek? When they go to commercials does he sometimes call a contestant a dumbass? Because sometimes the old woman with negative 1500 bucks looks like she was browbeaten when they come back from break.

Robertson's Reviews

This could turn into a fairly regular posting, as I watch a ton of movies and TV. Let me know your opinions on what I review and I might give them another try. Also I review them as a guy, for entertainment purposes, so don't be yelling that I'm giving action movies decent scores. But here goes this week's reviews:

Movies

The Bank Job: Jason Stratham(The Transporter) and a group of amateur criminals get a tip on an easy bank score which ends up being a lot more than they planned for. I thought this movie was really good. It had a sorta old time heist movie feel to the whole thing and every character plays their role very well. The only problem I have is that Jason Stratham is always just Jason Stratham. Sure he does a good job being the family man thief, looking for a better life for his wife and kids, but hes still Jason Stratham instead of his character, his appearance looks exactly like all his other roles. Its a British heist movie so his voice is the exact same as all his other roles. Not that this is a problem, I love his movies, but he could really use a movie where they give him some hair and make him speak without an accent.
Overall I would give it a 4 out of 5

Hitman: Timothy Olyphant (Live Free or Die Hard) plays Agent 47 the perfect killer from the hit video game series in a movie not short on crazy gunfight scenes. This movie was interesting. The action scenes were very good and conveyed the badassness that you feel in the game. However the script was absolutely horrible. I wasn't expecting a cinematic masterpiece but some of the parts were really painful. Also while some parts expresses the darkness of the latest two games, it could have been a little better. Also the game is more about the silent kill. Sure you can have the gunfights to spice up the movie but if its a Hitman movie, there should be him sneaking up with the piano wire or killing with a engineered creative kill, at least more creative than some fancy shooting. I don't know how this did in the theater but I guess it leaves a lot to be improved in the sequel.
Overall I would give it a 3 out of 5

Conspiracy: Val Kilmer (take your pick, hes done a bunch) plays an ex-marine spook who gets called to an Arizona town by his friend to help out but when he gets there he must unravel the mystery about why no one seems to know his friend. Why Val Kilmer are you taking roles like this? Aside from portraying a fairly believable amputee, its an awful movie. Its almost like they told Val Kilmer that he could be fat if he wanted to if he took this role. Sure the fight scenes are alright, more amazing that the enemies are as bad of shots as they are. It misses out on the dry comedic whit that I like about Val Kilmer in most of his movies. Its just one of about a half dozen movies out now trying to show the hardships of illegal Mexican immigrants in border towns. Overall its really not worth seeing and was definitely disappointing.
I would give it a 1 out of 5

Rambo: Slyvester Stalone (take your pick) reprises his role as commando killing machine John Rambo. Except this time aging Stalone, still big as a house, comes out of "retirement" to save a bunch of missionaries in Burma. This movie is the definition of violent. Head shots with a 50 cal? Check. Gutting people with a machete? Check. There's limbs flying and bodies exploding into an abundance of blood. Honestly it wasn't that bad. In fact after seeing the first couple Rambo movies, this movie was actually much better in my opinion. Instead of the human weapon in a civilian situation, hes out in his element using every weapon at his disposal. It wasn't an award worthy masterpiece or anything but it was definitely a decent sendoff for the series.
I give it a 3.5 out of 5

Fool's Gold: Matthew McConnehey and Kate Hudson are treasure hunters, with a rocky relationship, looking for The Queen's Dowry in sunken vessels in the Caribbean. Sure its a chick flick, but its got decent humor and plenty of eye candy with Kate Hudson. The only thing that drove me crazy was the daughter character. So obscenely annoying I was praying every time there was gunfire, even when she wasn't in the scene, that she would somehow get killed. Other then that it was pretty darn good. Good one to watch with your girl.
I give it a 3.5 out of 5

The Real World

Being in the real world is great. I can pretty much do whatever I fancy, eat whatever I want, when I want and spend my weekly paychecks on whatever I want (as long as I have enough at the end of the month to pay the bills). My problem is I don't really know how much I have to spend.

Sure I know how much is in my bank account, and how long I have until the big rent payment on the 1st but I still have to really think when I go out shopping whether I can swing picking up a pair of $20 pants. This somehow creates a strange outcome, I spend my money on interesting things on a whim instead of the things that I have been planning to buy for months. For example, I still dont have the wooden bed frame that I was planning to buy months ago after buying my big honkin' desk. Also I've had a plan for buying a flatscreen to go on the mantle, but it never seems like an ideal time to throw down the cash to buy it. Simple reason for both is that I really dont need them. My bed on its little metal legs is perfectly fine except for the bare white boxspring that seems to taunt me with its nakedness. And as far as the TV goes, I never sit in my living room, which is where the TV would go, so everytime I go to the store it seems like a giant waste of money. That said I instead go and actually waste my money.

This weekend I marked the culmination of a master plan several weeks in the making. After throwing out the dirty hand me down lawn furnature that sat unused on my balcony I came up with a plan. The Outdoor Futon. My futon was taken apart and in the outdoor storage closet I have since I got my new furniture(which I've sat on maybe twice). My problem was that I didnt want to put the futon mattress on it and have it get wet and mildewy with the weather. I had checked out outdoor mattresses online and realized that they were ungodly expensive. Then it dawned on me one day while perusing the wares of my local Walmart superstore. I could use lounge chair mattresses. So I finally picked two up, assembled the futon on the balcony (not as easy as it sounds) and threw them down on the futon. I found it nice that they included ties on them, but was disappointed when I found that they only were on half of it. So now I have to engineer a way to put a loop through the other corner so the back piece doesnt lean down disappointedly. I could probably borrow the work rivet machine that we never use. Never-the-less I definitely enjoyed the 80 degree weather today while I had a sandwich and read Entertainment Weekly on the fancy ghetto futon I've created.

How You Know You Are Fucked on the Oregon Trail

I've traveled over 1400 miles, only one dead so far (sorry Allie that being on the verge of death couldn't wait 23 more miles) and $138 in the bank. The rivers are acting like they want me to lose when I caulk those wagons and float across, meeting the line of rocks that goes the entire length of the river. I'm down to three oxen so I'm going at a mind numbing rate across the prairie. When all of a sudden my axle breaks. The Indian, who just happened to be passing by 200 miles from the nearest outpost says he will fix it for $150. He doesn't seem to be fooled into taking my $138, bastard, so now what do I do. I try to steal from someone else's wagon, get shot and that's all she wrote, thanks Oregon Trail, good times.

Best facebook application ever. Even though I didn't qualify for the survey which would have given me the fake dollars I needed to fix the wagon and not start my short life of Midwestern crime. Thanks for shooting me Laurie, if I would have had to stop and rest for the mysterious ailment of "Really wants a cigar" one more time (or Bryan's constant bouts with cholera, which I have no idea what the symptoms are but it sounds like an STD), I would have been offing those freeloaders left and right.

My Job is Slowly Killing Me, But I Enjoy Every Minute

I love my job.

Not many people out there can honestly say this but I love it. I can't see myself happier anywhere else (except maybe if there was a position for a chief of a village full of frisky naked supermodels, still hoping to hear back from Career Builder on that one). In case y'all don't know I am a graphic designer for a sign company. I design, redesign and recreate signs for a multitude of different clients. For example today I started the day changing designs for a church, moved on to helping a coworker peal vinyl for a tech company and then designed signs for my Alma mater, a ballroom, a real estate agency, a rail trail and two different other business parks. Its amazing and every single day has this amount of variability. Tomorrow I could be doing signs for parking garages (I'm in charge of two of them, over a hundred signs each to design, cut vinyl for, and finish) or finishing a monument sign for a hospice center.

I really love the term "monument sign". I could be elsewhere designing ads for magazines and newspapers, but where else can I say that I design MONUMENTS. I mean that's some serious stuff. Those signs are going to be around for a long time (unless someone smacks them with a car or shoots the face with a shotgun, seen both already and I've only been here for a couple months) and they are usually really huge momentous things which give my ego a field day.

Another great thing about my job is the people around me. There are maybe 16 people that work for the company and every single one of them is a nice person. We celebrate every one's birthday with a food item of their choice (leftover ice cream today for the win) and everyone is always joking around and really enjoying themselves.

Also I get off at 11:30 on Fridays. During the rest of the week I work 9 hour days so Friday rolls around and I work a nice tidy little 4 and a half hour day and start my weekend.

So after reading all of this you must be asking why it is slowly killing me. Aside from the having to be at work at 7, which I don't think I will ever get used to, its hellish jobs like the one this afternoon. From the beginning I thought to myself that this job will be a nightmare. Only been with the company for several months but I'm starting to see them coming. This job if you would look at it would seem like nothing at all, like something we could knock out in a half a day including fabrication. But then there's the hundred hidden things. The sign is so big that I had to find a way to cut it into two pieces on the screen. The client wants the one letter to go into the border so I have to find a way to cut away the bottom of the letter without disrupting the outline of the letter's shape. And the computers are BAT SHIT CRAZY. They seriously have a mind of their own, in which one of the words works perfectly fine and the other word acts like it doesn't exist. I switch and redo for hours, my computer decides its going to stop working so I have to redo the whole process again and the word still doesn't work the way it should. The router operator is telling me about how I will have to stand in a sand blast booth where the sand shoots so fast the deflection ricochets back and rips the skin off your body if we can't figure this out and at the same time a man from the school district stops by to order six more of the pain in the butt three layer signs that they love so much.........

But at least there was a break for ice cream.

Lesson for the Week

No matter how much you like the smell of your sink dish soap, its never a good idea to add that to the dishwasher.

So tonight I was cleaning up the dishes like I usually do before bed and put them in the dishwasher and noticed my Joy in the sink smelled really nice but I'm lazy a large amount of the time at home so I figured what could it hurt to add a little to the dishwasher with the soap meant for the dishwasher.

I walk away and busy myself with coming up with my grocery list for tomorrow and I'm looking through this cookbook my mom sent me and writing down ingredients that I need to make a couple dishes. I'm standing in front of the dishwasher minding my own business when suddenly my feet get this weird feeling, almost like being wet...........

I look down and I have soap suds streaming out of my dishwasher. I'm up to my ankles in suds. I start cracking up like no body's business and go sliding around my kitchen floor, grab my mop and make the best of a bad situation and use the suds to mop my kitchen floor, then throw down about five towels and skate around on them drying everything up until it stopped spewing bubbles all over the place.

Gotta love being a stupid guy hahaha
But on the plus side, my kitchen smells lemony fresh.

Surprise! Look Who's Emo Now

Not that I expect many people to read this or even less to care about it, I've decided to write my thoughts on the Internet for those followers of my great ways to see what I'm actually thinking when I'm sitting back and being quiet.

But lets start with a topic that is near and dear to my heart, the nickname Kegstand. In the grand scheme of things its not the worst nickname in the world (sorry PeeWee), but at the same time if you introduce me to a beautiful woman, it gets kinda awkward. This is the typical introduction.

Me:Hi I'm Mike
Hot Chick: Hi Mike I'm -insert hot girl name-
One of my loving friends: This is Kegstand.
Hot Chick: Oh really why do they call you that

Which I normally come up with a silly response such as my parents were hippies or I don't care enough and say that I'm an alcoholic which when you get introduced as Kegstand that's what they were thinking anyway and if I tell the real story its usually followed by "But seriously since I've known the guy hes done maybe one kegstand," by my loving friend, really adding a nice poser quality to the alcoholic image this girl has in the back of her mind. I swear,with as little as I drink its amazing the quantity of people that probably think I'm on the fast track to an AA meeting. Sorta gives the name a legend-esque quality of itself.

To whoever might be concerned the surprisingly dull story that accompanies my nickname goes as follows. When I was first joining the skydiving club in college(OK its not a totally lame story, i sorta get some points at this part id say, who knows, i read girls like ancient Chinese, not very well) we had this party that started at two in the afternoon and consisted of about a dozen of us sitting around a keg on someones porch. Now I was fairly new to the whole drinking thing and I really don't have a problem trying new things (except for several things i might discuss at a later time), so they asked me if I wanted to do a kegstand. I said sure, did a crappy one which probably ended with me spitting a mouthful of beer on my holders' shoes and sat down and continued drinking. By the end of the night I did three or four more kegstands because heck I was trying to make a good impression to my new skydiving friends. So at the meeting next week we realize that there are way too many Mikes in the club, so one gets Mike, one gets Mikkel(pronounced Michael but spelled super gay) and Motorcycle Mike, who surprisingly rode a motorcycle and then they got to me and said, "What should we call him, hey he did four kegstands at the party, how about Kegstand Mike." Over the years it has been shortened and the Mike was dropped and there're several fairly interesting variations that women have come up with but the nickname continues. And its really true, since freshman year of college I've probably done three kegstands since.

But you cant shake a nickname you don't like, especially if you don't speak up about it for several years. I get a kick out of friends though that will call me Mike once or twice and go "you see that i called you by your given name" Congrats to you, your cookie is in the mail, you probably still don't know my last name though.

Being called by a name you don't particularly enjoy does give you a sort of interesting bit of satisfaction though when you meet another group of friends that call you by your god given name. In these groups of friends I am like a CIA agent making sure that one group of friends doesn't somehow interact enough that the corruption of the bad nickname spreads to the other group like a plague. A sinking feeling hits you when you hear your uninformed friend says "Yo Mike, this guy says your nickname is Kegstand, that's cool why didn't you say anything"

Sigh.

Of course there are are the interesting times when the chick hears it as Kickstand. Its usually a fun look and a few seconds until my loving friends laughs and pats me on the back and corrects the girl's image of Michael the sexual god with Michael the alcoholic. Thanks guys, thanks a ton.