So here's my Country/Western mix. I hardly expect this to be a popular download, but I've been listening to these songs quite a bit lately. This ranges all over the place, from weird folk pop (the Kenny Rogers song) to Western Swing (Boxcar Willie's covering of "San Antonio Rose") to Bread ripoffs (Don Williams) to songs that are essentially Blues cuts (Patsy Cline's "Hungry for Love"). This is all classic country music, none of that shit that I grew up thinking was country music. I've left the stuff I've grown to love over the years (Hank, Cash, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Bob Wills, etc...), but there's several covers paying tribute to them, so their footprints are felt. I also wish a few Jim Reeves songs could've made it on here, too. But I'm preparing to send this computer away for repair and wanted to get this up and out before doing it. That said, I'm embarrassed I don't know more Patsy Cline, because pretty much every song of hers is absolutely beautiful. I know she has 2 songs here, as does Conway Twitty. They're worth it, trust me. I was very close to having two seperate artists with the name Billie Jo on here. In time, I might make another one, but this will work for now. I may have posted Patti Page's "Tennessee Waltz" here before, but what can I say I love that song. Thank Keith Richards and the movie Zabriskie Point.

One of my biggest complains about music I don't like is that I have no place to listen to it in my life. This covers a lot of different things, and to be honest I never thought I'd have much use for Country music. Which is odd, considering I listen to Blues and Bluegrass probably once a day at least). But I've found that Country music is good in several instances for me.
1) Cooking. if you're taking the time to make yourself and loved one(s) an actual meal, put this on. It's almost tailor made to accompany simmering sauces, sizzling oil, and melting butter.
2) Drinking. I'm not talking about your nights out a tthe club. I don't mean telling your bartender to put this on. I'm speaking specifically of 2 scenarios. The first is in a filthy, smoky bar, surrounded by older men by themselves with a lot on their minds. In this case, there should be a jukebox with plenty of other Country music on there. The second, though, is that rare wonderful form of warm weather, outdoor drinking with friends, at a leisurely pace and with friends. ah yes. Clearly you can combine the above two activities. Maybe not barbecue music, but how about after the sun goes down, near a still-hot grill?
3) Long drives. This is a time-honored tradition. I just never understood why until recently.
Or play this while you're doing whatever you damn well want. I've been listening to these songs while I work with great results. I wouldn't recommend working out to this, or running, but anything that isn't strenuous should work. Anyway, here we are:

Rock, Flag & Eagle: Cotton's Second Wave of Country that doesn't suck.
1. "Wild Side of Life" - Freddy Fender
2. "Rhythm & Booze" - Buck Owens
3. "Paths of Victory" - Anne Muray
4. Six Days on the Road" - Dave dudley
5. "Walkin' After Midnight" - Patsy Cline
6. "Big Train" - Conway Twitty
7. "Happiness of Having You" - Charley Pride
8. "I Don't Claim to Be an Angel" - Kitty Wells
9. "Shine On Ruby Mountain" - Kenny Rogers & the First Edition
10. "King of Fools" - Ed Brice
11. "The Pill" - Loretta Lynn
12. "Please Help Me I'm Falling" - Hank Locklin
13. "San Antonio Rose" - Boxcar Willie
14. "Linda On My Mind" - Conway Twitty
15. "Stand By Your Man" - Lynn Anderson
16. "In the Jailhouse Now" - Webb Pierce
17. "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" - Billie Jo Spears
18. "Cold Cold Heart" - Jerry Lee Lewis
19. "Girl Left Alone" - Dolly Parton
20. "Hungry for Love" - Patsy Cline
21. "Take My Hand Awhile" - Don Williams
22. "The Tennessee Waltz" - Patti Page

Running time: 53:33
49.9 MB

Download here.

and yes, "The Pill" is about birth control. how progressive is that? Enjoy.

Thanks to the venerable Paper for finding this clip on Youtube.

Thanks, Warren Ellis.

I love your site. I really do. I've mentioned it here time and time again. I don't get into some of the weirdness that you post, but it's almost always thoughtworthy, and makes me feel a little smarter most of the time. I even check out the weird sex stuff, though I'll never understand how the hell you find it.

and now, thanks to you, I've got the indelible image of a man eating his own testicle in my brain. I'm not kidding. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Please excuse me while I scratch my own eyes out with a rusty melon baller.

okay, it's pretty common knowledge that Q-tips are bad for you, and that since 1997, so has Q-Tip. Forgive me for the terrible joke. I know how bad it is, but I was certain that the Kamaal the Abstract joke I had there would've gone considerably worse.
My problem is that I like q-tips. Does anybody actually not like using them? It takes 2 seconds and you know right away whether or not you've made an improvement*. For probably close to a decade now I've known what they can do to your ear canal, but this hasn't stopped me from just using them to clean my outer ear. I don't know how dangerous that is, but damned if I'm going to stop, despite the considerable damage to my hearing that's already been done. I wish I could just move on to ear drops and be done with it. Fact is, I own and use ear drops. But I hate them. I don't like lying on my side, I don't like intentionally dripping a cold liquid into my ear canal, and I don't like using a rubber bulb thingy to flush it out with water. Yes, there isn't ONE part of that process that I like.
"Well" I can hear you saying, "do you like having good hearing, Cotton? Do you like not being deaf?"
Oh, you smug bastards. my reply to this is to shout "shut up!" and run away crying. Suck on THAT, Kreskin.

*I know this is disgusting. It absolutely is. But I look, and I'm betting that you probably do, too. or that perverse little peek into a kleenex once you've blown your nose. But let's face it, keeping track of what comes out of your body is only slightly less important than keeping track of what goes into it. But then I've been known to drip fake blood in my ears in public to play jokes on my family, so who knows what runs though my head.

Rainbow.

I've been getting more feedback on the new header than anything I've posted on here in months. Which is sort of nice. Unfortunately, it was just the first properly-shaped pic I could find and supposed to be a stopgap until I could upload one of my own pics. Eventually, it will be something that looks just as nice I hope, but for now this will hold. It is NOT the view from my pad, unfortunately, but if you put a Verizon building in the way it might not be far off.
Also, my apologies to anyone that has called me in the past few days and hasn't gotten a response. Since I get no reception in my house that means I have to talk outside. and since it's been raining for the last several days straight, well, you see where I'm going...

According to polls, Obama will never get the nomination and it doesn't matter because McCain will beat both him and Hillary. Please remember that the next time I'm ranting hysterically on how much I hate polls and the way they guide politics.

that said, the State of the Union is tonight, and I'm wondering how much $$$ I can get for the Chinese Babies I'm going to say I adopted last year. Also, I'm a veteran that works out of the home and I adopted my aircraft carrier to charity.

I'm thinking of not posting the Economist anymore, since at last check nobody cares. Let me know if that's not the case, because I don't really check those numbers often. If I did, I probably would've given up on this months ago.

just a note, I'm not posting 3 times a day now, but I am gonna make a bit more of a differentiation in my topics, so you don't have to read my bitching about politics in the same post as my bitching about the plausibility of outer space movies. So from now on I'll try to keep my bitching separate by subcategories. Because I wrote all this crap in one sitting and am pretty confused by it.

more crap

Things that have made my life better in the past coupla days:
-4 inches of rain. sorry, mudslidey people and the rest of Southern California, I'm loving this, and I dealt with having zero rain for the past 8 months so stop whining, and SERIOUSLY stop using causeways. You know those Greek myths that always result in someone enduring the same gruesome punishment day in and day out for eternity? I'm beginning to think that California might exist in that realm. How can you be surprised by wildfires and keep building in desert scrub brush? How can you possible be surprised by mudslides when you keep building on these embankments? Jesus, you people are prepared for EARTHQUAKES. Grow some initiative. (Yes, I'm now living in mythology).
-The return of Lost. To be honest, I was pretty disappointed by that last finale, but at this point what else is there, other than the 3 remaining episodes of the Wire (which I'm considering burying in the yard for a rainy day)? The dad from Malcolm in the Middle starting a meth lab? Soul-crushing Pitt Basketball? Working on the massive story I've been working out in my head for six months? yeah, right. Especially after that omega-whine I posted above, which has me questioning the validity of it altogether. Sweet doubt.
-the 12 CD Country Legends box set. It's odd that I'm listening to this. It might be because all of the Country Western songs I learned from the Blues Brothers are on it. It might be because of the Johnny Cash obsession I built up last year. But the fact that I've decided to stop drinking for a couple weeks while listening to this and gearing up for the State of the Union is nothing short of astounding. I'm kinda proud of me. I'm hoping to have a pretty solid Country mix up here in a week or so.
-Thao Nguyen and the Get Down Stay Downs. I thought I said something about this album here earlier, but I didn't. I love it. I loved her old stuff, but I love this more. Imagine if Modest Mouse was fronted by a lady, picked up Ween's 12 Country Golden Greats instead of Johnny Marr, and didn't rape people. and then make it better.
-The Writer's Strike. of course I hate it, but I'm praying to god that this results in some sort of hellstorm that sucks ALL of reality TV into some nether vortex made of fire, nails and Benny Hill.
-The very idea that Vince Vaughn went on a comedy tour and taped it. I don't give a shit how his comedy is, the very premise of this is ripe for calamity. I eagerly await a drunken Vaughn telling us how he "really feels".
-The rapid approach of commercial space travel. I can assure you I will never leave this planet's atmosphere unless forced.

Action post #11! Seriously not worth your time.

Yesterday I sat through a movie that I'd been warned about. A movie that, despite the writer and director's last collaboration being one of my favorite films of all-time, I put off in hesitation until yesterday. That film, of course, is Little Man.
But seriously, I loved 28 Days Later, despite it moving into a completely different third act that I would've headed. I even like The Beach, even though, wait, what the hell happened in the beach?A morally wounded Robert Carlyle, and DiCaprio eating frogs in a video game or some shit. Weren't they growing heroin? I seem to remember saying "I'd be taking a bunch of that heroin and offing myself out of my misery, cuz" while watching it. I dunno, I should try to give that another viewing. oh, and that UNKLE song with Richard Ashcroft.
ANYWAY.
Sunshine was probably the best looking movie I've seen in a very long time. It was fucking gorgeous. I'll chalk that up to Alwin H. Kuchler's* cinematography as much as anything else. But yeah, it started out with one of the most serially abused plots that science fiction has ever coughed up**. A crew of a spaceship is en route to shoot a thermonuclear weapon into the heart of our dying sun in hopes of re-igniting it. I guess that part's not so hackneyed, but lets look at this on simpler terms. A diverse (and brilliant) team is on a mission in an extremely remote and inaccessible part of the world when their mission gets sidetracked be the appearance of another craft either long thought disappeared or showing evidence of being there for an extremely long time.
sound familiar? It should, because it's been done to goddamned death. And while we're spared the image of Sam Neill sans derma***, there's still plenty of other tripe for you to swallow. While trying not to give away the plot for you auto masochists out there, I will say that there a a slew of completely absurd script turns that had me so bewildered by halfway through the movie that it was doomed from the beginning. Which is odd, because I like to think I'm great with suspending my disbelief (the first rule of appreciating sci-fi). I truly want to think this is possible. now am I a nitpicker. I don't count bullets in action movies and I don't look for continuity errors. and I'm certainly not a physicist. But when you have space travel depicted as being refined the way they do, nobody forgets a goddamned thing as long as it's important. Nobody displays the gross errors that take place in this movie more than once. It just don't happen.
But that's now where I'm going with this. My point is that I've seen this a hundred times, at least. and EVERY SINGLE TIME I'm excited in the beginning. As they show a spaceship going through an average boring day, I find myself genuinely interested and watching the way simple tasks are performed. I want to see where they get oxygen or what their meals are like or whatever. That's great! But then there's always some stupid shit that starts taking place as soon as they hook up with this supposedly dead ship. Thoughts become reality. The ship is possessed by the Norse god of death. Ghost poops. Whatever. There's no going back from something like that. There's no way this isn't gonna piss me off. You're already in outer space, or at the bottom of the ocean. There's no need to ratchet up the drama right now. Explore this a bit. You don't need to introduce a supernatural mystery or a god-like entity anymore. Why don't they aver get that?
I was talking with some friends about this earlier, and I was citing The Black Hole as probably the best example of this sort of plot working, and I think I may still stand by that, with apologies to The Forbidden Planet (specifically to Leslie Nielsen and the midget inside Robby the Robot)****.
The Black Hole is the first movie I can ever remember seeing, which probably has something to do with it. But everything from the design schemes to the killer robots to burial services (!) to fucking ERNEST BORGNINE IN SPACE. Seriously, how can you justify that guy being in space, EVER?***** and this isn't even going into the greater ideas that go into the film, the questions of what makes humanity and how or why someone would create a robot with the voice of Slim Pickens******. Goddamn I love that movie, and now I'm gonna have to go watch it for the first time in years. Yes, my rant is over that fast.

I am acutely aware of the frequent references to godawful science fiction movies here lately. I promise I'll try to stop. The worst part is that I haven't seen almost any of these movies in over a decade and I still remember them. I might be able to provide you with 5 or 6 facts that I learned in all of college. But I can name at LEAST 5 science fiction movies that Ernest Borgnine was in. Sweet fuck what is wrong with me? and my apologies, Ernest, for assuming you were dead.


*Strangely, the only other movie he's worked on that I've ever seen was the violently disturbing Ratcatcher, which didn't impress me much. He's working on the Wolf Man revamp next. huh.
**And that's saying something, no?
*** This isn't an indictment of Event Horizon so much as it is of Sam Neill, who I still somehow blame for John Carpenter's butchering of In the Mouth of Madness.
**** Strangely, Borgnine would appear again with Yvette Mimieux in a startlingly similar (albeit underwater-themed) movie with Walter Pidgeon from Forbidden Planet called The Neptune Factor, in which the most interesting thing is what Ben Gazzara looked like when he was young. I'll save you 98 minutes by providing you with that here. These footnotes are getting out of control. Imagine what it must by like to think this way, it's like a hamster trying to run in six different wheels. X-rays of my cranium have shown pretty much exactly that.
***** This is not the only, but probably the main reason why Laser Mission is the worst movie ever made. Man, I need a nap.
******I know, I'm more tired of them than you. But I can't question why someone would program a robot to have a thick country accent without pointing out that someone programed the downfall-of-mankind robot with a thick Austrian accent. Clearly the future hasn't lost their sense of humor. Good, we'll need it.

Congratulations on another temporary flag, Iraq.

as frustrating as the process must seem, imagine if our representatives were right now forced to pick/design a new flag for our country.

actually, that's sort of nice.

Clearly I've had my share of annoying variations on my name. Here, the history of one of them has been presented.

how do I like being called "Cotton-Eyed Joe?" Probably as much as Joe likes being called Cotton.
which is to say, much more than "Polyster", but still far less than Cotton.

ummm.....

I don't really surf around on youtube. Fact is, I barely go to that site. If you've emailed me a link in the past few years or told me to look up that fuckwit in the wig crying about Britney, I just ignored it. Sorry.
I've got no reason to ignore these. I'm sure there's a lot of great stuff. But it's been made abundantly clear to me that there's a lot of utter horseshit to wade through to find it, and I do enough of that in my other pursuits. Every once in awhile, though, I head over there when google provides me with a link to some weird cryptozoological sighting or footage of Farley and Odenkirk onstage together at Second City (though superdeluxe is much better for the comedy stuff) or, in the rare cases, footage from terrible movies I'd forgotten existed.
You see, I have a weird aversion to Fred Ward. Don't ask me why, I can't tell you. But I've never seen all but two of his movies (The Right Stuff and Naked Gun 33 1/3, neither of which I'd really cal a Fred Ward movie, but I digress). So I was kicking around the idea of forcing myself to watch a Fred Ward movie marathon. Yes, I am completely aware of how stupid and ludicrous this is.
Anyway, I could've sworn that he was in a movie that was on cable for a couple minutes in the way early 90s. I only remembered that it had giant robots and a fucking terrible name. Four minutes on google later, and I give you Robot Jox.
Even better, there was a clip on youtube:

holy shit. I'm not sure if you watched that, but it's completely absurd. Especially the ending, which almost has me weeping with glee.
I've never denied my nerdiness, even when I was old/young enough to know better. But sweet disco jesus this is some next level shit. I love that the piss-poor, filter mask-wearing peasants pay to go watch wars fought by giant robots AND THEN GET CRUSHED BY THEM. Yeah, I know. cinematic gold.
Anyways, I just totally stumbled across this and had to share. I also found a great and surprisingly interesting review here (it shut a movie studio down!) if you're actually curious about it and want to find out how it ends. It took an hour and a half less to slog through and was 3 times as funny.

yeah, I pretty much just wasted a minute or two of your life. 6-8 if you watched that clip. But oh, how I laughed.

INCIDENTALLY I also remembered Beyond the Stars, which is potentially worse than the movie above, only with an infinitely better cast. Fucking HBO. My adolescence was ruined by you and your shitball movies like these, and Just One of the Guys, and Cadence (Martin Sheen = asshole dad again!). the near pedophilic Blame It On Rio, Killer Klowns from Outer Space and goddamned Diving In and Blown Away (okay, I did watch that way more than I should've just to see Nicole Eggert's tits), Warlock, the horse-raping Rock n' Roll High School Forever and the turd with the Baloosh and those stupid kids in the solar-powered car, and My Bodyguard and Corvette Summer and Caddyshack II and Lonely Hearts... fucking Lonely Hearts. Okay, pretty much any movie starring Eric Roberts, Michael Paré, Dolph Lundgren, Don "The Dragon" Wilson, Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van-Damme, Jeff Speakman, Matt Adler, Leo Rossi... these were all instrumental in forming the mental defective whose screeds you see here. I love The Wire. It's without question the best written show on television. It joins Mr. Show, Deadwood and Six Feet Under in my favorite shows of all time. Lucky Louie, Curb, Carnivale, Extras, Not Necessarily the News, Oz, the Sopranos... these are all great shows. I've devoted hours and hours to watching (and in the cases of the first few, rewatching) the cream of your original content crop.

But if and when you sue me for hundreds of thousands of dollars for downloading the season finale of last season's Curb Your Enthusiasm, I'm going to walk into that courtroom and slam down a list of the most ridiculous, insulting, corrosive torrent of movies that have ever been wrought upon this world. They'll be all "You know what happened to Richard Lewis for free!" and I'll stand up, adjust my tie, and say "You ruined The Toy for me!" murmurs would spread through the courtroom. and I'd continue: "I saw Summer School 250 times". This time a gasp. and then, then, my friends, I'll call out. "The Worst Witch, you sadistic bastards". full-scale pandemonium would break out. The DA would spontaneously burst into flames. The Judge would instantly go insane and the jury would lapse into an orgy without skipping a beat. All because you wanted to scare scare some dumbass teen straight. Are you ready to go that distance, HBO? I'll blow the fucking lid off your whole operation. So go ahead and try me. and I will call down the thunder!
So let's keep this civil, HBO. It's in your hands.

PS this is probably the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen, let alone wrote.

Things I've appreciated in the past week:
-The way Albert King wrings notes out of his Flying V
-Liz Lemon saying "blurg" in "30 Rock"
-the lizard I probably killed by "setting free" of the window sill I found it in on Saturday
-The life-sized cutout of Tommy "Tiny" Lister in the BBQ place we found yesterday. Apparently he endorses them.
-Pixar's For the Birds
-finding out that my sister has a blog that she sent everyone in my family (including my wife) a link to but me.
-Earl Hooker just being his own bad self
-Judd Winick's Green Arrow/Black Canary, #4. Watching Oliver Queen, who has become one of my favorite characters in recent memory, fall apart at the loss of his only son, then force himself to let his friends help him take care of things. It's hard to explain, but it was spectacularly done.
-The E Street Band, circa 1976-79, Holy shit. HOLY SHIT.
-City desk editor Gus Haynes in the final season of The Wire. I'm just sad they didn't introduce his character sooner.
-Re-listening to the Replacements compilation All for Nothing/Nothing for All. I got the recent "oral history" of the 'Mats, and I'm just excited to start reading it.
-Watching four crows gang up on a Cooper's Hawk while at the park throwing a frisbee around. It was almost painful to watch as they dove and pecked at his head, but he persevered and eventually the crows gave up in search of an easier meal. Less than a half mile away, there was a vintage air show. P-47s and P-51s were looping around, cutting their engines midair and going on mock strafing runs, while we stood completely still, holding the disc at my side, staring straight up into the sky at some birds.
-An Apricot Pinwheel at Some Crust
-Rube goldberg machines at Oobject. made my week.

Here's your mind-blowingly disturbing Halliburton news of the day.

China to join the Saudis in buying up our country's personal debts, since they're already in control of much of our national debt. great. America to get job peeing in own Coke.

This is suspect. right?

The Economist 1/12 - 1/18

new mix

Croatoan
1. "There's Boys at our school who ain't heard anybody like that..."
2. "Beat (Health, Life and Fired)" - Thao Nguyen & the Get Down Stay Downs
3. Drive Me Crazy" - The Penetrators
4. "Tom Hark" - Elias and his Zig-Zag Jive Flutes
5. "Sober Driver" - Dengue Fever
6. "Snatching It Back" - Clarence Carter
7. "Ballad of My Friends" - Zookeeper
8. "Although when I lived in California for a year..."
9. "San Bernardino" - Mountain Goats
10. "Pink Mammoth" - Pelican
11. "Don't Stay Away" - Phyllis Dillon
12. "Violator" - White Williams
13. "I'm Too Tough (For Mr. Big Stuff)" - Vicki Anderson
14. "When She Comes" - Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show
15. "A yellowish color eye..."
16. "In the Crown of Lost Light" - Old Time Relijun
17. "Heavy Reggae (Johnny Reggae)" - Roosevelt Singers
18. "Pomona" - Radar Brothers
19. "What Needs Must Be" - Dead Meadow
20. "Short Life of Trouble" - Emry Arthur
21. "One day last year..."

1:00:37

here

I completely forgot how much I love Futurama.

The Economist, 1/5/08

Major Andrew Olmsted,

R.I.P.

I was just thinking to myself that I hope I make it back home before my mother moves, so that she doesn't have to go through the stacks of books, old love letters, high school journals, and fifteen years' worth of music magazines. I was thinking that I'd rather be the one to go through these things, separate what I want from them, and burn the rest in a field somewhere. and then it hit me.

I don't even know where a field is anymore back home. I mean, I can think of some places, but the fields that I spent a sizable portion of my adolescence burning shit it are no longer in existence. Gone are the locations of several dozen bottle rocket wars, choked-down cigarettes, pyromaniacal episodes, and subsequent threats to take us to the burn ward. All gone. huh. Guess I'll just have to recycle that stuff.

Theme Time Radio Hour Ep. 14: The Devil

2008 is here

It's 2008. Wheeee.

I can honestly say that it was the most uneventful (and sober!) New Year's Eve that I can recall ever having. There's not really much to go into about it, but having my mother tell me repeatedly how need to make friends in California didn't make it any more entertaining. In all, though, it wasn't that bad a night, considering I refuse to go to bars on holidays anymore and I wasn't in Hollywood. So there's that. I hope you all had a lovely night and partook in whatever traditions that you have. Unless that tradition is murdering me.

Anyway, what I really wanted to get down to is that I had myself a movie marathon last weekend. The theme was car chases. You could say that it was pretty much an excuse for me to drink bourbon and stay up all night watching road movies, and you might not be wrong. But it was a lot of fun, and I'm seriously considering doing this every other month or so. Is this ridiculous, especially when I'm the only one watching them? Maybe I should start taking notes of these as they happen so that I can preserve them for posterity*. or maybe should just not do them. Thoughts? In any case, the movie lineup went something like:

Duel
Two-Lane Blacktop
Ronin
Convoy
Bullitt
the Road Warrior
Vanishing Point
Cannonball Run (not watched)

My grounds were basically that they couldn't be movies I've seen in the last year (except The Road Warrior, which I could watch on a loop for years and never get sick of) and no more than one by the same director.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have included Ronin. I remembered there being far more car chases in that movie and found myself thrown way off while I was viewing it. I should've kept these within a certain time frame or something, because even the filmmaking was baffling at that point. Someone suggested Death Proof, which would've been great if I only watched the 2 car chases in it. Otherwise, it just would've pissed me off. Anyways, in all it was a great time and I recommend it to everyone. If you've got a good idea for a theme, let me know. right now I'm considering now include:

-unintentional horror movies.
-foreign zombie movies
-summer camp (horror and non-horror) movies
-con/grift movies
-Jimmy Stewart is Sincere
-the worst war movies
-Samuel L. Jackson is Overacting
-filthy Westerns
-the Harry Dean Stanton memorial retrospective
-Wes Anderson Owes Me Money
-movies that take a religious metaphor waaaay too far

obviously, the more likely a movie is to not put me to sleep, the better. so yeah, if you got any recommendations don't be shy with them.

Anyway, there's plenty I could waste our time discussing here, but instead I'm going to go read more crap about Iowa and then go to sleep out of fear.

I did want to say I had a nice trip home, however short, and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to meet up with about 75% of the people I said I would. I won't really go into it here, but there was a lot going on and there were people that needed me. I hope you understand and accept my apologies. I owe you.

oh, and while we're all still giddy with the fresh year, The NYT ran a pretty good editorial, even if it forgets how much of a direct role they played in many of the issues they name.

*a friend suggested live blogging this. My concern was that I wouldn't really get a chance to see much of the movies and that it would inevitably turn into a drunken tirade that my family would read, which I'm not all that keen on. But then when has that ever stopped me?