wildyams

Friday after work I drove down to Long Beach to have dinner with Steve-o, Juliette, Jon, Bob and Becky. Steve-o had been teasing me all week that he had a birthday present for me, which is odd because my birthday is in December, but what the hey. I got down there and Steve-o sprung the present on me, and it turned out to be a large collection of bottles of root beer which are hard to find (none of which I'd ever heard of or tasted), and the finale was a one gallon party keg of Virgil's root beer. He made me promise to write reviews of each kind of root beer, or at least grade them, so he'd know which one I liked best. He also wanted me to give a couple more mainstream root beers grades as frames of reference (this reminded me of the scene in Beautiful Girls where Timothy Hutton is asked to ascribe a numerical rating for the face, body and personality of his girlfriend, but first had to rate three other girls his friends knew as a frame of reference :lol). I have never really been asked to review food or beverages before, and don't have much confidence in my palate, but it'll give me something to blog about I suppose. So anyway, here's my frames of reference:

A&W - I'm not a big fan of this root beer, but maybe it's just because it's so common and I've had so much of it over the years that I got tired of it. It's kind of bitter and harsh, I suppose. I'll give it a C-.

Dad's - I get this every time I go to Phillippe's. It's rather sweet, but it's also a touch harsher than I prefer. I'd give this a B-

Henry Weinhard's - For me this is "the gold standard". It's the best root beer I've ever had (thus far, anyway). It's sweet, it's smooth, it's delicious. This gets an A, definitely.

Ok, now that there's frames of reference for you, on to my first review: I decided to go with Boylan Bottleworks root beer first. I'm not sure why I picked it first, it had a simple label and the bottle was simple as well. I figured I should start with something that didn't come across as too flamboyant (like Rat Bastard root beer, for instance :lol). Anyway, I rather liked Boylan's. It reminded me a lot of Dad's, but it was a lot more smooth. It was sweet and tasty as well, and I would definitely like to try it again sometime. I'll give it a B+

According to Ain't It Cool News Brett Ratner is going to direct X-Men 3. The only good news about this statement is that the source is AICN, which is run by a moron, so that means there's at least some chance that the story is not true. If this is in fact who is going to direct X-Men 3, then that franchise is dead. The bad news continues, with rumors that the script involves killing off two of the main characters, and the plot being about the father of a mutant being upset that he has a mutant kid, so he gets a serum from some other mutant which will help wipe out all mutants. If this sounds like almost the exact same plot as X-Men 2, that's because it is. Why oh why don't the studios have any idea when it comes to picking directors that will make good movies? Why do they insist on turning successful franchises (like the Alien and Predator movies) or big-name comic book movies (like the Fantastic Four) over to complete hacks like Brett Ratner, Paul W.S. Anderson and Tim Story? :nono

In other news Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss are gonna star in a remake of The Poseidon Adventure and there's a Garfield sequel in the works :lol

Tonight Shaquille O'Neal and the Miami Heat were eliminated from the NBA playoffs as the Detroit Pistons will advance to play the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Finals for the championship.

Now I haven't blogged about basketball in quite a while, and the reason for that is simple: my team, the Lakers, were out of it long ago, and there wasn't much to say other than "wait till next year." As I said when the Lakers traded Shaq, I didn't think they were title contenders and it was going to take them a little while to get back to the upper echelon of the league, so this season wasn't a big shock for me, knowing that the Lakers were starting over; but I was glad that they had decided to start over last year. This entire season, however, almost everyone came out and said the Lakers had made a mistake. They said "look at how well the Heat are doing" and "the Lakers aren't winning games without Shaq". Shaq took last summer's trade as the excuse he needed to finally get in shape (either that or it was the fact that he's going to be looking for a contract extension this summer or next summer), and as a result the Heat had the league's second best record and Shaq was the runner up in the MVP voting, losing out to Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns (the team with the league's best record).

But as a long time Laker fan, I knew what apparently many people didn't know or had forgotten. To paraphrase Shaq back in 2000 "It don't mean a thing without the ring." In other words, the Heat and Shaq could play as great as they wanted, but if they didn't win the title this year then they would ultimately have finished as well as the Lakers, since only one team wins, and there's no second place trophy. The last few years the Lakers did well, and had strong showings, and made it into the last few rounds of the playoffs (last year coming 3 wins away from winning it all), but without any championships to show for it, ultimately what it meant was that LA had taken two years to get farther over the salary cap, and older at the same time. With the Lakers being arguably the most successful franchise in the NBA, as a fan I felt that if they weren't going to win, then they needed to make a change. Since the only people they had to trade that anyone would want were Shaq and Kobe, Kobe seemed like the smarter choice in terms of who they should keep. Kobe is younger, cheaper and hungrier, so why not keep him and trade Shaq?

Sure with Shaq I knew the Heat were going to be much better than the Lakers, but if neither team won it all, then did the Heat really win something the Lakers didn't? The answer is, no they didn't. In fact, as of right now the Lakers are in a better position since they have a higher draft pick because they finished much worse than the Heat did. Also, the Lakers aren't going to have any major contract issues with any key players for a couple years, while the Heat are going to have to deal with extending Shaq's contract in the next year or two, or face having him leave as a free agent (leaving them with nothing). As Shaq gets older and gets nearer to that extension, teams are going to be less and less inclined to want to trade for him, so unless the Heat trade him pretty quick, they'll either be stuck with the option of overpaying to keep him, or lose him for nothing. It's a decision I'm glad the Lakers don't have to worry about making, because neither option is a good one.

Personally, I was happy as hell to see Shaq and the Heat lose, and not just because it somewhat vindicates the Lakers' trade last summer. Shaq has been running his mouth about the Lakers and the fans here in Los Angeles for about the last year, and he rather quickly resumed the position I had for him before the Lakers acquired him back in the summer of 1996 as my least favorite player in the league. So I'm rather tickled to see him lose and come away for the third straight year with everyone wondering "if he's the supposed 'Most Dominant Ever' as he claims to be, why hasn't he been able to win lately?" The answer is clear, but Shaq won't want to hear it: he's not effective anymore. I was so anticipating the Heat losing tonight that I made sure to Tivo the game just so I could grab a funny still shot of Shaq looking confused as the game was either about to be over or after they'd lost, and I couldn't have asked for a better picture, check it out:

Click to Enlarge

:lol :lol :lol

Here's a couple funny links from tonight's game:
Shaq promising to bring Miami a championship last summer
TNT's "Gone Fishin'" pic for the Heat

Sorry I haven't made an entry lately, I haven't had much to blog about. I was looking forward to having a bunch of root beer related entries, but I got sick last Tuesday night and as such my sense of taste (and smell) have all but deserted me in the meantime. I came to work on Wednesday and Thursday of last week because even though I really felt awful, I had stuff that I absolutely had to do and had clients I had to meet with; but Friday I took off. I realized that other than two days I took off in January to go to Texas, this was the only day I'd taken off from work since last summer. For a slacker like myself, that's quite a realization. :eek So it was an exciting weekend for me, of staying in bed, sleeping a lot, watching a lot of TV and never leaving my apartment. Whoopee. I'm still congested today, but I feel better, and besides, we're so busy at work that nobody can really afford to be out for very long. Hopefully my congestion will go away soon so I can go back to sampling my root beers and write up some reviews!

Yesterday Phil Jackson announced he had signed a 3-year deal to coach the Los Angeles Lakers again. This is big news since a year ago, after the Lakers were defeated in the NBA Finals by the Pistons, Phil was not re-signed after his contract finished, and the Lakers instead went with former Rockets coach, Rudy Tomjanovich. Rudy T only lasted a few months before retiring due to stress and health issues, and the Lakers were coached for the rest of the season by former Phil Jackson assistant, Frank Hamblen. It was widely rumored that Phil was not retained for last season because Kobe Bryant didn't like him as a coach, and Phil went on to release a "tell all" book about the Lakers in which he supposedly said Kobe was not very coachable and that Phil had told the Lakers he wanted Kobe traded. Phil's being re-hired like this makes you wonder how much of what went on between Kobe and Phil was as it appeared, or if it was, if it has been patched up. Some speculate that Phil was re-hired because after the poor season the Lakers had, Jerry Buss (owner of the Lakers) is trying to help fans justify paying top dollar for Laker tickets next year, even though the team is essentially the same bad one that didn't make the playoffs this year.

While my socks are in the dryer I thought I'd recap the weekend since I've been neglecting my blog so much that some people have begun having conversations with themselves here :lol This weekend hasn't been long enough. Not by a long shot. Last week was pretty crazy with me pulling a couple really late nights back to back and everyone scrambling around to get all of our stuff done. This week promises to be more of the same, and I'm really not ready to go back to it yet. Thankfully if I can just make it to Friday I'll have 10 days in a row away from work, with a couple of those days being spent fishing in Alaska with my Dad.

Speaking of my Dad, it was a happy Father's Day today as I went over to his place and took him out to lunch at Pie N Burger; then afterwards we went to go see Layer Cake (which was pretty good except the theater had the sound turned way down, making some of the dialogue actually hard to hear), and then we went out to dinner at the Yard House at the Paseo. I'd never been there before, but it was rather tasty. In and amongst all this we watched a few sporting events: the tail end of the Red Sox game, the US Open and the NBA Finals Game 5. Along with Rebecca, I got my Dad a couple bottles of wine which came highly recommended by the good folks at Greenblatts (since I don't know diddly poo about wine), so hopefully my Dad will like them.

The highlight of the weekend unquestionably came Friday night after work when a bunch of us went to a screening of Showgirls at the Egyptian Theater. We were expecting a packed house, but the place was barely a third full. Even still, it was one of the best times I've ever had at the movies as the audience was just perfect, laughing hysterically and giggling the whole way through it, and applauding loudly at all the really ridiculous points (in particular when Robert Davi waxed philosophically with the line "It must be weird, not having anybody cum on you." :lol). I think I speak for everyone in attendance when I say it was just a hell of a good time. Unfortunately after I left I realized I was supposed to have worked out the details with Amy and Andrew about going to see Batman Begins at the Chinese the next day, but I didn't and didn't have their numbers or email addresses or anything, so unfortunately I didn't get to go see that :sad But it was a great weekend otherwise :smile

I don't normally like to just lift something off of another blog and re-post it (I've already got links to Fark and Boing Boing over on the left after all), but this is just too fantastic to not post here. What can I say, I love to see a large company's wacky publicity stunt go haywire :lol

Under the noontime sun of New York's first day of summer, Snapple, the soft drink maker, answered the question of whether a 17 1/2-ton Popsicle can be made to stand upright in Union Square.

It cannot.

In a brave attempt to surpass a Guinness record - "The World's Largest Popsicle" - Snapple mixed and froze a gargantuan icy doppelganger of its new kiwi-strawberry flavored Snapple on Ice. Then the frozen treat was hauled by freezer truck from Edison, N.J., and raised with an enormous crane in Manhattan.

Alas, like James Arness in the 1951 alien thriller "The Thing From Another World," the giant Snapsicle began to melt. Soon pedestrians were fleeing in not-quite terror, fire trucks were converging and the police were closing off streets to contain the publicity stunt gone wrong.

Snapple officials first started to worry when the pink liquid began to flow onto East 17th Street. They feared cyclists and automobiles would slip in the ooze...

Maria Ortiz, 45, a cleaning worker at Sephora, a makeup and perfume store at the north end of Union Square, noticed the hubbub.

"There was a lot of pink water, pouring all the way down" onto East 17th Street, she said. Then she noticed the crane stop as it tried to lift the giant Popsicle, like a frozen flagpole.

Ms. Ortiz, of East New York, Brooklyn, said she and her co-workers were waiting for the Popsicle to go up. "But we didn't see the pop, just the pink water flowing down the street," and here she spread her hands, as if parting the Red Sea.

The Police and Fire Departments were summoned. Breaking News Network, which monitors police scanners for news organizations, sent out an alert:

"A giant Popsicle being displayed by Snapple has melted in the heat and sun and spilled all over 17th Street. F.D. on scene attempting to wash down the roadway - sticky goo all over the area."

What went wrong?

To paraphrase Cameron Poe, my first guess would be "a lot."

On Tuesday night I went and saw Batman Begins with J Krue and I was pretty impressed with it. It's kinda stuck with me since I saw it, and I thought I should maybe write something about it. Some are calling it the greatest comic book movie ever, and I might agree with that. I'm not sure yet, I think I need to see it again. It's definitely in the top 5 comic book movies ever, and is without question far better than any of the other Batman movies (unless of course you count the original one from 1966 starring Adam West and Burt Ward :lol). It is very different than any other comic book movie I've ever seen, in that it attempts to portray Bruce Wayne/Batman as a real person. It tries to portray almost everything in the movie in a way that makes you think these could be real people and this could happen. Now it is the story of Batman so it's not like you really think this could happen, but I just mean that the approach they took with it was like if Batman was real, what would it be like. In this way it is very much the opposite of both Burton and Schumaker's Batman movies. I'm not much of a Tim Burton fan, but with Batman he did really set a precedent for bringing a comic book to life in a movie, or at least giving the movie a real comic book look and feel to it. Now 15 years later every comic book movie strives to achieve that, and it is extremely overdone. It's gone so far to that end that a movie like Batman Begins stands out because for much of it it strives to not look like a comic book.

There were both good and bad things about Batman Begins, and even though I'm being long winded here, I wanted to get a couple of my thoughts down. I think the movie was actually kind of hurt somewhat by the fact that ultimately Bruce Wayne does become Batman and gets his gadgets and puts on the cape and cowl, because with all the other attempts at realism in the story, those are obviously the hardest points to sell. They do a very commendable job though, but you can't help but feel that the movie might have been more enjoyable if they'd diverged a bit from the whole "Batman" aspect of it. A guy who goes through the journey that Bruce Wayne does is compelling enough without the Batman framework around it, and so I have to say I enjoyed the first half of the movie more. But the second half is still very good, don't get me wrong.

One of the best things about the second half of the movie was that much of the big action scenes were not CG. Until seeing this movie I hadn't realized how much I missed seeing action scenes in movies that were just done with stuntment and all caught on camera. Sure there is some CG, but much like Peter Jackson with Lord of the Rings it seems like Christopher Nolan understands that CG needs to be mixed in with live-action to try to create as real an effect as possible. I think too often today filmmakers get so caught up in what they can create using CG that they forget that what they create won't look real no matter how good the computer renders it simply because the people don't look like they're following the laws of physics. Spiderman flying around like he has in those two movies looked great except that the character didn't appear to have any weight or seemed to be defying gravity.

I'm really excited to see where they decide to go with the next Batman movie, provided Christopher Nolan signs on to direct it and they get someone good to play the Joker. I think the Joker is really going to be a make or break moment for these movies, because he is such a cartoon-like character, and yet with Batman Begins they dialed down the cartoonish aspects of everything. If they try to make the Joker a total clown with green hair and purple pants squirting acid out of a flower on his lapel and giggling a lot, it really won't mesh with what they've set up. But if they make the Joker a truly twisted homocidial maniac who is so crazy and unpredictable that he actually becomes scary, then that is something else. I think the key is to try to make the Joker scary and not make him the film's comic relief. Anyway, there's already dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of discussions going on around the web about who would be a great choice to play the Joker, and I'm not really sure who would be a good choice, but I wanted to post this piece of fan-art that someone somewhere made about what the Joker could look like:

Click to enlarge

Works for me :smile

Last night I went to see Land of the Dead with J Krue, and we both really enjoyed it. I think we were both almost tempted to say it was better than Romero's Dawn of the Dead (not that remake from last year), but even if it wasn't, it was pretty close. We both thought it was interesting that even though it was the first zombie movie from Romero that wasn't unrated (it is rated R), it didn't seem to have let up on the gore at all. Maybe the R Rating has changed since Day of the Dead came out and that gore effects no longer really warrant an NC-17 rating or necessitate a film being unrated. It was also good to see that when given a bigger budget, Romero put it to good use and it contributed a lot to the quality of the movie. It is definitely the kind of movie to see on the big screen because the action and explosions and pushing and shoving and whatnot were pretty kick-ass up there. Also the crowd at the Arclight last night was really into it, applauding the title of the movie and cheering when Tom Savini showed up as a zombie, and effectively cringing and moaning and groaning during the scary and gory scenes.

This'll probably be my last entry for about a week or so (which isn't too unusual around here lately, I know), because tomorrow I am going to go to my Dad's place to stay the night, then he and I are getting up early Monday morning to fly to Alaska to do some fishing for a couple days, and I won't be back until the end of the week. I'm so excited to go back to Alaska and do some King Salmon and halibut fishing again, and I'm equally excited to just be able to take 10 days off from work. It's been really crazy at work for a while now with all the stuff we have been doing, so it is a much deserved break. So that's all from me for a week or so. Until then, don't let The Man get you down :smile

I got up at about 6 am at my Dad's house to get ready because we left shortly thereafter to make it to LAX for our flight. Our flight on Alaska Airlines was delayed about 30-45 minutes, and since we got there with plenty of time to spare anyway, we had a while to wait for our flight. We flew to Seattle and from there had a connecting flight to our eventual destination: Ketchikan. However, our flight from Seattle was delayed about 4 hours because the plane we were going up on was coming from Calgary and was running late. We saw there was another flight which was leaving after ours was originally scheduled to leave, but was about two hours earlier than our flight had been bumped to so we went to the service counter to see if they could switch us. While we were waiting in line (we were near the front of a line that had close to a hundred people in it) they told the line that the other flight was already oversold by 10 people, so we'd have to wait. While they were making this announcement, the guy in front of us in line (whose flight to Anchorage had been cancelled) yelled at the person behind the counter something to the effect of "can't you just move the fucking line along!" to which the counter-person responded that if he used language like that again she wouldn't help him at all. I don't think anyone was expecting the guy's response though, because he was suddenly on the verge of tears and said that he had to get home because his father had just been eaten by a Grizzly bear :eek It turns out a couple was discovered Monday to have been attacked and killed by a Grizzly bear, so the guy was probably telling the truth. The whole thing was really pretty shocking, lemme tell you, and it made our flight delay seem like it wasn't so bad. We got up to Ketchikan late, obviously, but we got into our place ok and they heated up some dinner for us and we went to bed shortly thereafter because we had to get up at 6 for breakfast and then to go out and fish.

While the weather up in Ketchikan had been nice Monday evening, it was raining and windy Tuesday morning, and our guide Shawn advised us that we were not going to go out to the ocean because of the weather, and were instead going to limit our fishing to the bay. He said he wouldn't lie to us, that the better fishing was out in the ocean, but that the waves would be rather large out there, and even if it was fishable at all (which he said it probably wouldn't be), odds are we'd be so miserable that we wouldn't have had any fun at all. We had a pretty good day anyway though, with my Dad and myself each catching our limit of king salmon and halibut (one king apiece and two halibut apiece). My Dad also caught a silver salmon and another king which was just under the allowed size limit so we had to throw it back (which was fine, he caught a bigger one later anyway). Our kings were probably both around 15 lbs or so, and we each caught a halibut that probably weighed maybe 30 lbs; then additionally my Dad caught probably a 40-45 lb halibut, and I caught what turned out to be the biggest fish between us for the two days, a 54 lb halibut. I'll give you the quick rundown on what fishing for salmon vs fishing for halibut is like. Fishing for salmon you troll around with hooks baited and when the fish hits, you spend anywhere from 5 minutes to maybe an hour and a half fighting with the fish to reel it in (how much it fights is dependent on its size generally). Salmon are a lot of fun to catch. Halibut, on the other hand, are not much fun at all to fish for, but they are damned tasty and they're much larger than salmon. A halibut is a bottom-feeder which just looks like a big flounder and you go out to deeper parts of the ocean, drop anchor and then just load your line with heavy weights and bait and drop it all the way down to the bottom. Then when you get a hit you just spend the next 5-20 minutes reeling its heavy ass to the surface. Halibut don't tend to fight much, they're just big and heavy; and pulling that 54 pounder up from 345 feet really wore me out. Near the end I was worried I was going to let go of the pole just because the muscles in my left hand and forearm were so tired from gripping the rod so tight for that long. All in all it was a pretty good day though, with us bringing in maybe 35-45 lbs of salmon and maybe 120-150 lbs of halibut (when they filet the fish you generally can get 50% of the salmon to eat and about 40% of the halibut). We finished fishing at around 3 pm and the rest of the day was uneventful as we went to bed early again.

This was maybe the most miserable day I've had in years, at least the first half of it was, and I'm still paying for it. The weather wasn't much better than the day before, but our new guide, Jerry, told us we were going out to the ocean where, as he put it, "real men fish", and told us that it should be rough getting out there, but once we were out there it shouldn't be too bad. The ride out took almost two and a half hours, and the seas were plenty rough getting out there. If you've never done an extended trip in a small boat going full boar in rough seas you probably can't appreciate how little enjoyment there is to be had, but all I could really equate it with is travelling in a car with no shocks at high speeds where you launch off about a 5-10 foot jump ever couple seconds and just slam back to the ground, never slowing up. I almost tweaked my ankle a few times from some of these impacts, but eventually we made it out there. All that violent up and down motion had my stomach feeling a bit queasy, but I figured once we got out to where we were going and stopped that would go away. It probably would have but the seas were plenty rough once we got out there. The boat was fiberglass so we were all slipping around the back end of it while we were trying to fish, and a couple times water splashed up and over the side and soaked me and the others. On top of that, the salmon weren't biting much at all, and after about an hour and a half of sitting there watching my rod, and reeling it in from time to time to check to make sure there was still bait on it, eventually I felt my breakfast coming back up. So I got sick over the side for about a minute or two and then figured I was done fishing for the day, so I went back in the cabin and just put my head down. My Dad caught the limit for kings (this took probably another hour or two), and then we headed off. I'm not sure if we were heading off to go to a spot for halibut or if we were just going back because I was in such bad shape, but it didn't matter because after another 30 minutes or so of full-speed through the rough surf I raced outside again and threw up the rest of my breakfast (they didn't slow the boat down for this, so I was holding on for dear life as I did it). Afterwards I sat down on the only thing to sit down on in the back, the cover for the inboard motor, while I tried to collect myself when we hit a much-larger-than-usual wave and I got pitched off of my seat. The good news was that I didn't get pitched out of the boat, but the bad news was that I did get pitched head-first into the side of the boat, and used my left temple to stop me from flying through the air. I wasn't knocked out, but it was really painful, and of course I started to worry about whether I might have fractured my skull or whatever. Turns out I was fine (believe me though, my head is still throbbing), but it was almost worth it at the time it happened just because it got Jerry to cut the engines for a second and rush back to see if I was ok. Well whether we had been heading out to find halibut or had been going back in to drop me off before, they decided to take me in and drop me off (for which I was very grateful), and then they went out in the bay to find halibut. They didn't catch any halibut though, but I got to clean up and relax and eventually I was able to eat something. It was an early night again because we had an early morning flight the next day.