C'est Non Un Blog

Well, I’ve been on vacation since last Wednesday and aside from a few minor hiccups (like my plane in Newark not showing up at the airport until four hours after it was suppose to) things have been going pretty well. I got to see Amanda and two Jeremy’s at Candeleros in Manchester on Thursday, picked up a nice new pair of sandles, and have eaten lots of good food and drank large quantities of good beer.

There has been one problem though. There is a reason I am usually so pale and colourless people, and it has to do with the reason why I hate the sun and its natural side effect, the heat. And that is heat rash. I can’t remember the last time that I’ve had a sunburn, but almost every time in the last ten years that I’ve spent any sort of significant amount of time in the sun I have come away from the situation with heat rash, which is what I am suffering through currently.

Do you know how much it sucks being stuck at the beach with heat rash? You can’t really do anything other than sit around and feel prickly. What’s worse is that while I’ve given my arms and face some much needed brown, my chest is still frighteningly pale. Gah!

Do me a favor people. Send me a text or give me a call. Do something to make me forget that the skin on my arms feels like they are trying to crawl away from me.

I just got back from seeing The Dark Knight. If you didn’t already have plans to go see this, make them. Batman Begins was probably the best superhero movie out there when it came out, but it is nothing compared to this. Wow. Consider my mind blown. Batman has never been cooler.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie that really made me feel the joy that is going to going to the movies. The Dark Knight is that movie. I had to pull myself away from getting right back in line to see it again, it was that good.

 Check it out here!  It looks just as awesome as Casino Royale.

Here are two things–one awesome, one sucky–I discovered watching the trailers before Wanted:

1) I had heard that R rated movies were going to start playing Red Band trailers before them again (for those who don’t know, Green Band trailers are for General Audiences, Red Band for Restricted Audiences) but I hadn’t actually seen one in the theaters until today while watching Wanted. I had to restrain myself from clapping when I saw the screen fill with a blood red light before the trailer for Step-Brothers, the new Will Ferrell movie. And sure enough, there were some big jokes that revolved around the use of the F-word. Bravo, Hollywood. Maybe we’ve finally gotten past that whole Post-Nipplegate bullshit.

2) If you haven’t seen Death Race 2000 yet, do yourself a solid favor and rent this awesome Roger Corman flick. What doesn’t look so promising is the new remake I saw a trailer for, which is just titled “Death Race”. Jason Statham plays the lead, but instead of reprising David Carradine’s awesome Frankenstein, a masked man who enters the Death Race for mysterious reasons to shake the game up, he’s instead a NASCAR driver framed with his wife’s murder to add a little drama to the Death Race.

This is where Paul W.S. Anderson ruins a great idea, kinda like he always does. He takes a super original idea and manages to make it feel like every other movie you have ever seen. Instead of going with the plot of the original, which involves a cross country road race with colorful celebrity drivers, where you get points for killing your opponents and random pedestrians (TV audiences lap this stuff up) this one involves prison inmates racing around what looks like a bland industrial park, killing each other for their freedom. It’s kind of like a boring remake of the Running Man, only instead of running, they drive cars. I was kind of pumped for a Death Race remake, but this trailer really turned my stomach on this property.

…You can both find AND buy your Fourth of July fireworks at the checkout line in Target.

Seriously.

When it comes to how I listen to music, I guess you could call me a traditionalist. Working around electronics all day, I get to hear about how everyone and their mother (literally) are throwing out their CDs and switching to MP3s. No one is even buying CDs anymore, and aside from the occasional Lil’ Wayne success story the traditional music industry is drying up as artists struggle to find a way to make money from touring. This is silly though, for several reasons. The main reason being quality.

Most people who are rushing to convert their CD collection to MP3s or who are buying all of their new music off of iTunes don’t realize that in doing so they are degrading the quality of their music to almost unacceptable levels. Sure, it sounds great on your iPod earbuds or on your laptop’s computer speakers, but try listening to that same song on a great set of speakers or headphones and you might start to realize what you are missing. What’s worse is that a lot of studios are recording their music louder to sound good on your laptop speakers, which again degrades the quality of the sound. MP3s have created a revolution in how we listen to music, but they’ve caused almost as much harm as good.

Like I said, you could call me a traditionalist. While everyone else buys all of their music on iTunes (or just plain steals it) I still buy roughly 8 CDs a week. Who buys CDs anymore? Me, that’s who. What’s interesting is that there has been a backlash against this poor quality problem. Some people do give a crap what their music sounds like. And for the first time since the 80’s vinyl and turntable sales have actually increased. People are buying records again for their superior quality of sound. And I’m one of those people.

Yesterday I finally got my new turntable working (Who knew you had to press down when screwing something in?!) and went to Easy Street to spend way too much money on new vinyl. I have to say, I quite enjoy listening to my favorite songs on vinyl. Once you get past the inconvenience of not being able to sit on the couch for more than twenty minutes before having to flip the record, it’s a lot of fun. You get such a clean, natural sound from a record. It’s hard to pinpoint what it is exactly, but vinyl sounds more real and lifelike in the room while CDs sound cleaner, but more sterile. Sounds like the strings on Coldplay’s new single, Viva la Vida sound a lot more lifelike and euphoric. I dunno, listening to vinyl makes you feel like you are more connected to the music, both in how you have to physically put the needle on the record and flip sides and also in how it sounds. Music fans, I recommend you invest in a turntable.

GUY: [looking at girl on other side of the elevator] Are you shivering?

GIRL: No.

GUY: You are totally shivering.

GIRL: I’m not shivering.

GUY: Oh, so you are just shaking like a sausage?

[the other girl with them starts to laugh]

GIRL: What??

GUY: Shaking like a sausage. What? Don’t look at me. It’s a song.

[awkward laughter]

GIRL 2: It’s “shake it like a salt shaker”.

GUY: Really?

GIRL 2: Uh, yeah.

GUY: Huh, I never knew that.

——

Uh, seriously dude? What the heck does shake it like a sausage even mean??!

Lara Logan was on the Daily Show last night.

I just thought I had to share.