Mon, 25 Oct 2004

The Religion of Operating Systems

Derek sent me this interesting column called The Religion of Operating Systems. I found it to be pretty interesting. Whatchoo think?

25 Oct 12:30 | /tech | 0 comment(s)


Sat, 23 Oct 2004

Montpellier Syrah

A quick wine recommendation- Montpellier Syrah. Quite nice, and I think it costs ~ $5 a bottle. Que ganga!

23 Oct 13:14 | /food_and_drink | 0 comment(s)


Lazy Saturday

It's a lazy Saturday in SF today. I've got Jacques on the tv, some coffee beans in the roaster, and an espresso in my hand. It's a bit cool outside and there's a steady but light rain outside in the park. It's going to be a nice slow day.

23 Oct 13:09 | /food_and_drink | 0 comment(s)


Thu, 21 Oct 2004

A pdf file? Great. . .

via pridkett
You are .pdf No matter where you go you look the same. You are an acrobat. Nothing is more important to you than the printed word.
Which File Extension are You?

21 Oct 15:14 | /humor | 0 comment(s)


Tue, 19 Oct 2004

Patrick wakes me up

LizBorden: that is seriously the last time i ever make a political comment in my journal
LizBorden: i'm gonna stick to fucked up links
eltejano: that's what I do- f'd up links, movies and stupid ramblings all in one
LizBorden: i mean
LizBorden: i enjoy informed discussions and arguements and all
flats: haha
LizBorden: but typing this much is a lot of work
pridkett: elte: your journal is a little like a teen journal from livejournal, but with wine, and no boyfriends
LizBorden: HAHAHAHA
eltejano: ouch
pridkett: not like mine is much better

19 Oct 10:59 | /humor | 0 comment(s)


Thu, 14 Oct 2004

Shaun of the Dead ***

I saw Shaun of the Dead the other day. Nice, smart, witty flick. I recommend it. One bit made me laugh out loud - the protagonist and his buddy are drunk and coming out of the pub, and they're singing White Lines to each other. Cracked me up because, well, I do that. Oh, and there are some Queen songs in the movie too. You can't beat that.

Liked Shaun of the Dead? Then go watch Versus or Evil Dead.

14 Oct 13:07 | /movies | 0 comment(s)


Spun - 0

There are many things I'm a big fan of. In particular I'm a big fan of hot naked women. I'm also a big fan of Schwartzmans being on top of hot naked women. Unfortunately for the movie Spun, those two items are just about all it has in its favor. And to make matters worse, they didn't use this Schwartzman to get on top of the naked ladies, they used Jason (no relation- that I know of).

Spun failed my 3Day Movie Test (tm). It's a good looking movie, don't get me wrong, but there's barely any story. And the story that is there is just dumb. I gave a flying rat's ass about the characters. By the second half I was wishing them harm.

It was filmed by music director Jonas Akerlund, and it looks like a music video in parts. A long time ago my friend Will gave me a Jonas Akerlund reel- I thought it was pretty cool. It was mostly music videos. Since they were for different artists the video was disjointed as a whole, but hey- the individual vids were great- and it wasn't a movie. Now, imagine stringing all of those together with a lame plot and lamer characters and you have Spun.

Positive: looks great, cool actors, good cameos
Negative: lame story, waste of time, derivative-
I almost wanted to write a whole rant about the two undercover cops subplot and how lame it was.

Oh one other complaint- since when did drug movies all start using the same fast action clips?

Drugs out |fast cut | drug preparing | fast cut | injection or snort clip | fast cut | Eye Dialation clip
Starts with "C" ryhmes with sashay.

Spun sucks, go rent The Salton Sea instead.

14 Oct 12:24 | /movies | 0 comment(s)


Tue, 12 Oct 2004

The Legend of Suriyothai - 0

Suriyothai- One of the first movies to fail my three day movie test (tm) in quite a while. I'm not sure why it drove me bonkers, but it did. You see, I *wanted* to like this movie. I think it was oversold and was billed as "important" so it's easy to knock off it's peg.

Let's start with the negative first- the movie tells the tale of an important, historically-based legend. It's a long soap-opera with a lot of plot twists that covers a huge span of time. Okay, so if you have a historical flick, things are gonna get cut out. But that's problematic with the limitations of a film's timeframe.

Since the story is based on historical events foreigners like me won't grasp some subtleties and the historical context, so narration or extra scenes/lines?/backstories? need to be added.

Adding, removing - what's a director to do? I'm not sure. But what they did here was make a great looking movie that tries to make the best of the long story it tries to tell.

The critical build up was to a final battle/confrontation and that was over and done with in a few minutes. It detracted from the whole effort. The whole story is about this Princess/Queen/Royal Family member who's going to be making this *huge* sacrifice in a battle for her people. Then when it happens, it's just, hrm, odd. . . Her actions seem almost hasty and dumb. There must be more to it though- the whole royal blood lines and how royals are supposed to act. . .

Okay, enough (mild)ranting and rambling. There's a 5 hour version of this flick, but I'm not going to watch it. Supposedly the Coppola team which was involved in the editing of this flick cut a ton of stuff out to make this ponderous tale coherent.

Is there anything good about the movie? Sure- it looks great. The tales of the royal court are intriguing. But the best thing? HUGE ASS ELEPHANT BATTLES!! How cool is that?

It's cool- but not enough to recommend this movie. Go watch Ong Bak instead.

By the way- I know some people who watch any movie that was nominated for the Academy Awards. I think this was nominated for best foreign language flick, but I need to look that up.

12 Oct 13:22 | /movies | 0 comment(s)


Mon, 11 Oct 2004

Luddition Through Economics

Luddition Through Economics, some feedback

from: Jeff P
to: Kenneth

luddition through economics..reminds me of better off dead*
"so why are you guys here at the gas n' sip on a saturday night with no women in sight?!"
"choice, man. yeah, choice"

* editor's note: I think this was Say Anything

Update: Marisa emailed the correct passage:
Say Anything-

LLOYD I got a question. If you guys know so much about women, how come you're here at like the Gas 'n' sip on a Saturday night completely alone, drinking beers, no women anywhere?
Silence.
JOE By choice, man!
GUY 2 Yeah man, conscious choice.
They all agree.
GUY 1 I'm choosing it.

11 Oct 12:47 | /humor | 0 comment(s)


Thu, 07 Oct 2004

Domestic Bubbles Taste-Off

sparkling wineSo I recently went to Pak's for a wine tasting event. More specifically- domestic bubbles under $30. Everyone brought a bottle, immeditately wrapped it numbered it, and prepped it for the blind taste testing. There were 13 bottles in all. The results are below.

Pak's email and notes:

Here's the tally (the tie for first relfects the misnumbering of the bottles vs. the cards and is noone's fault but my own; I was too tipsy at the time of the mistake being discovered [thanks regs] to realize the tie was between two different winemakers):



Some interesting notes from the cards I have in my possession:
wine's place - comment

An interesting tidbit that's not listed in Pak's email/notes above is that all night there was a spit cup/pour off vessel on the table. Apparently after Marisa and I left and the partying and imbibing continued, someone decided to compare the derided Sophia to the Spit Bucket! Guess what, THE SPITBUCKET WON. And from what I hear - there was more than one judge to verify that ranking.

Quick note: I claimed my quotes above w/ an * and edited the locale where I got the Kenwood.

07 Oct 14:09 | /food_and_drink | 0 comment(s)


Tue, 05 Oct 2004

Blah blah

So I'm sitting here sipping a double espresso that I just had Silvia make for me, and I start to realize I have the blahs again. A little has to do with the fact that SF's just plain cold and foggy again (especially in my neighborhood). A little bit has to be because the foggyness leads to contemplative moods. Maybe I just had a long day and need to get out or something. Who knows. For some reason I feel like making a to-do list. Then I can do things and check them off. Maybe the espresso will kick in and this feeling will pass. Who knows. I just thought I'd ramble and write for a bit.

Just some quick thoughts:

Google Alerts is pretty cool, but can be alarming at the quantity of email it can generate- pick your subjects carefully.

Sophia Bubbly ranks pretty low. When I get my copy of a recent Domestic Bubbly tasting I'll illustrate more. (btw, Cory likes this, tee hee)

I love/hate how some of my favorite tunes are getting used. Good: Bowie's Starman on the trailer for The Life Aquatic bad: Coke's C2 use of Queen in their new commercial. Uggh. And I'm a coke guy too!
btw- Queen rules, as does ELO

05 Oct 19:46 | /general | 0 comment(s)


Sun, 03 Oct 2004

My 3 Day Movie Test (tm)

Hrm- I just realized I haven't been blogging much and haven't blogged at all about movies as I said I would. I recently watched two movies that barely passed my 3DT(tm): The Cooler and Dirty Pretty Things.

Just to preface this a bit, my 3DT got started after seeing The Usual Suspects at The Crossroads with Megan (the creator of the Meeg-a-rita, but that's another story). To make a long story short, some friends had asked what I thought of the flick immediately after the movie, then quoted me a few days later by which time my opion had changed. Of course this makes for fun discussions at parties, but it lead to me needing the 3DT (tm) when recommending (or not) movies I had seen.

Anyway, back to the 'reviews' . . .

The Cooler- immediately after watching this movie I was gung-ho about recommending it. The acting was great, especially Alec Baldwin's. I've liked Alec Baldwin ever since his turn as Lamont Cranston in The Shadow. I liked the story a lot, but a few things started to gnaw at me for the next few days.

I don't know what it is but a line or a bit of plot change can make me angry a few days later and blatantly dismiss a film as poop. I started to worry that this would happen here, as the next day I had already started to question a bit of "luck" at the end of the movie. I won't reveal anything about the movie here so don't worry, but without spoiling anything, the movie pushes its luck a bit with the main characters at the end. Watch it and tell me what you think. It didn't bother me enough to make the movie fail my 3DT (tm) though.

by the way, if you like The Cooler, you should check out a Spanish flick called Intacto.

Dirty Pretty Things is worth renting just so you can stare at Audrey Tautou as I did. I liked DPT, or as I call it DP Things because the porn connotations make me giggle, but two small things about it almost made me give it the "no".

The first irksome bit is that the movie felt like a BBC miniseries that got the go-ahead to get shortened and released as a feature flick. Okay, so part of me feels bad for ragging on "production values", but hey- that's what it felt like. There were times were that helped convey the bleakness of London though so maybe I should shut up.

The only other moment that made me say "boo!" was during the delivery of the "zing!" line towards the end by Okwe. It was a bit cheesy and barely worked in my humble opinion. But the thing is- you can't take that line out, and there's no other way to deliver it. The actors were good enough to pull it off. A decent flick, go rent it. Oh, and Audrey Tautou is in it.

By the way, "Sneaky", as played by Sergi Lopez was really good in DP Things. If you liked this flick you should check out Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien.

I'll add some more reviews as I get them in my Q from Netflix.

03 Oct 15:19 | /movies | 0 comment(s)


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