What do you think about this for the marquee?

My Photoshop skills are lacking. However, here is my best effort...
Let me know what you think. I know it's small...it will have to be twice as big...(Zoolander reference? Anyone?)

[Too late, it is now the official paci.blog marquee until, of course, I change it. That could be tomorrow, next week, or the month after.]

[Jen, notice the "Harvard Comma" above.]

Saw II and Other Cinematic Topics

Just got back from watching Saw II on screen number 2 at the Tremont Street Lowes Theater in Boston. While a lot has already been written about the original Saw and how it had a cop-out ending -- I don't agree. If you hated the first one, don't go see the second, you're not worthy. I don't know if it's more gruesome or less than the first and I don't care. At the end there is another one of those "flash-throughs" that rub in your face all of the little clues you were too stupid to miss. If you saw the first one and you weren't looking for obscure clues in the second, you'll be had. The writers did a fine piece of work here.

Now for the more important part -- the Trailers. Two trailers really stuck out in my head -- one whose movie I will go see and second where the jury is still out.

First, let me tell you about Underworld: Evolution. It's got Kate Beckinsale in it. Need I say more? Ok, I will. She looks HOTTER than she did in the first one. It also looks like there will be a hell of a lot more action with flashbacks to early battles between Werewolves and Vampires. Why are all female vampires hot? Why do all male vampires either look like Abe Vigoda or Eurotrash? If there's ever a movie I will camp out for, it'll be this one. If I lived in England, I would stalk Kate. (However, Claire Forlani also lives in England...choices! choices!)

The second film, however, I might just never go see as I am already having nightmares from the trailer and I haven't even gone to sleep. What kind of sick director directing what kind of sick movie could do that to me? Well, that would be Hostel directed by Eli Roth and produced by Quentin Tarantino. It's the story of three backpackers who...never mind here is the IMDB blurb:

Three backpackers head to a Slovakian city that promises to meet their hedonistic expectations, with no idea of the hell that awaits them.

Imagine being taken to a place where you are helpless and there is no hope. A place where people pay to torture and murder people they don't like. Imagine drills, saws, scalpels, bald dudes in blood-soaked leather aprons with instruments of torture and YOU ARE STRAPPED TO A GURNEY. Scary shit. I really don't think I could take this movie. Hell, 8mm still gives me the creeps.

I really home more than two or three people read this. I would like some feedback...

Anyone?

Anyone?

--Mike

Template redesign, again

I'll tell you right now, I am NOT happy with this redesign. However, my blind brother George was getting headaches from reading light colored text on a dark background. This is for you, George. I will tweak it a bit more for your sake (yes, all 3 of yours) in the coming days. It's much easier than adding any actual content that would draw people here.

On one of my original posts about my house (the one where I mention the tree not being there anymore) a guy whose blog I read regularly, came to the site and even left a comment. Since then the only comments I've received from people I don't know have been from spammers. Too bad.

I leave home in the morning before the sun rises and get home after it sets, so I've had no time to take a decent picture of the finished renovations. (Why not take a picture on the weekend you may ask? It's been raining cats and dogs for the past few weekends, that's why!)

Enough for now.

--Mike

One post accomplishes mentioning my favorite blog, name dropping, tying in to Lawrenceville, and jazzing Mike

From Best of the Web Today . (Butterfield is a reference to Fox Butterfield, a L'ville grad and NY Times reporter who covers crime by writing articles bemoaning the fact that more people are being locked up even as crime goes down. Full disclosure: I had dinner with him last year in Boston [the one at Morton's you didn't get invited to, Mike].)


Butterfield in Reuterville

From a Reuters dispatch on U.S. crime statistics:

The U.S. prison population continued to grow last year even though reports of violent crime during 2004 were at the lowest level since the government began compiling statistics 32 years ago, according to a government report released in September.

The other night, we realized that our degree of drunkenness was continuing to grow even though the liquor in the bottle was at the lowest level since we opened it. Life is full of paradoxes, isn't it?

Raaaanch... Ranch!

Bring me my ranch-dressing hose!

Blogging isn't easy

There's so much to this blogging thing that isn't easy. You've got to find material, find time, find more time, hope people will read your stuff, take shit when they disagree with you, and correct people after they take you to task for something one of your brothers wrote. Shared blogging, ouch!

Here on Paci.blog we have three distinct personalities...

First there's Rob who takes after our father. He likes to tell you what you NEED to do -- just look at some of his posts. Even when I agree with him, I get worked up because his delivery is so...grating.

Next there's George. He spends his time looking around the web for that one, single, perfect link (usually something nerdy, but that's ok) to post to the blog. Problem is that George is pretty well-read and can do much better than the sophomoric drivel he posts normally. Maybe he thinks he's too smart for our readers (all what, 3 of them) and your measly brains can't handle serious thought. Then again, probably not--he just doesn't have the time with 2 kids and a job and all. I don't even think he has Internet access at home. Poor bastard.

Then there's me. I tend to post stuff that may or may not piss you off and if it does it's probably not that bad and you deserve to be pissed at yourself for getting so pissed at something so innocuous. Make sense? Didn't think so. Unless, of course, you know me. I have the incredible, unmatched ability to get under people's skin and stay there...slowly driving them insane. It's quite fun. A buddy of mine, Doug Mazzoni, helped me hone that skill to perfection.

Look back to some of the early posts of this blog. You should see someone named Breedo taking all sides of an argument just so he can be right. That's unfortunate because he is usually wrong. I don't know how he does it, but he tends to have a cloud following him as well. He envies Charlie Brown's good luck.

I'm basically running at the mouth (keyboard?) here because I haven't posted anything to this site worth a damn in a long time and probably need to sit down and think of something funny or good or such. I know I could write thousands of words on my cats but most people would only read tens of those words before they go elsewhere and look for boobies on the net.

It's amazing how easy it is to get distracted with this net thing. Think of something **ZAP** there it is -- that can be both good (once and for all settling the argument of which blood is the universal donor O+ or O- ... it's O-) and bad (I wonder if there are any nude pics of Kate Beckinsale out there on the interweb .. there are) and ugly (you don't need an example of ugly, it's just way too easy to find.)

I really don't want to use this site to push an agenda (I'm way too lazy for that -- having an agenda, pushing one is way too far out there), but I also don't want it to become a poor-man's fark where it's just another place to go to get to boobies or stupid stuff.

ORIGINAL CONTENT! That's it! We need some original content here that will engage the reader and keep them coming back so that my google ads at the bottom may help me pay off my mortgage...(if you purchase one single ad...)

Just random Sunday night thoughts. Have a good week.

--Mike

Getting it exactly backwards

Derrick Z. "The Z stands for zstupid" Jackson of the Boston Glob makes the conventional wisdom case, rather poorly in this instance, that the GM/UAW healthcare coverage agreement shows why we need single-payer (i.e. socialized) health coverage in the USA.

He gets it exactly backwards. GM's health plan is the closest thing we HAVE to middle class national health care for all ages (Medicaid is for the poor, Medicare is for the old) in America. It has proved unaffordable because a) it is demographically unstable and b) there is no incentive for the consumers to consume rationally.

What were seeing is GM instituting rationing by raising copayments because it has become clear that no more big piles of cash exist to shore up the top-heavy system.

At least GM has the Chapter 11 gun to hold to the head of the UAW. We would have no such recourse against ourselves as taxpayers.

Gift Idea

Go see Serenity and you'll understand why I want this t-shirt.

First Simpsons Post

Nice new template, Mike.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is paciblog's first Simpsons post.

Here's and article from the WSJ (registration required?) on the new arabized Simpsons.

Among the many issues is this one, which also includes a favorite quote:

Few shows have more obsessed fans than "The Simpsons," and their vast online community is worried about whether classic Simpsons dialogue can even be translated. One blogger wrote, "'Hi-diddly-ho, neighbors!' How the h -- are they going to translate that? Or this great quote: Mr Burns: Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well I say, hard cheese."

A Preview of the Miers Confirmation Hearings

... is over at Hubris.

Nice job if you can lose it

The last sentence of today's WSJ cover story (subscribers only link) on the bankruptcy of auto parts supplier Delphi (formerly a part of GM) goes a long way to explaining why it (and most of the rest of the auto industry) is SCREWED.

The company spends about $400 million annually to cover costs on about 4,000 laid-off workers.

Doing the math, that's $100K per laid off employee. Now some of this is benefit cost rather than cash but still.....

These numbers check out with this recent Forbes article on GM's laid-off community.

Movie Trailer

If you haven't already seen the trailer for this Jack Nicholson movie, here it is.

The French

From Taranto's Best of the Web, which you NEED to read every day.

Playing Poulet
"Two years after relations between the US and France soured over the Iraq war, French-bashing in America appears alive and well in light of a recent ad campaign by a fast-food chain linking France and cowardice," Agence France-Presse reports:
The ad by the Subway chain touted a cordon bleu chicken sandwich with the words "France and chicken, somehow it just goes together." A photo of a chicken dressed like Napoleon accompanied the advertisement.
Subway ran the ads in about 10 US states for nearly a month and pulled them in September following an outcry by members of the French expatriate community and other customers offended by the racist undertone.
Mark Bridenbaker, a spokesman for Subway, which has outlets in France, defended the campaign telling AFP it was aimed at lauding French cuisine.
"The perfect match of French cuisine and the Subway chicken . . . that was the intent of this advertising," he said. "But once we realized that people were taking offense, we removed everything from stores right away."
OK, first of all, the French are weasels, not chickens. Second, it's pretty rich for the people who run a company that knuckles under to "an outcry by members of the French expatriate community" to be calling anyone chicken.

I love the Internet

Without it, how would we ever know what in-flight meals look like on the various airlines around the world. You can't make this stuff up.

(Now, for those of you who think I actually go looking for this stuff, I followed this link on Google News. Once I got there, I clicked around. What can I say, I like airplanes!)

Get Well George

When MTV didn't suck

This past week, for some reason, the Nick Lowe hit Cruel to be Kind got in my head and stuck there.
So today, after two and a half years, I finally got myself an iTunes Music Store account and grabbed some singles from Back When MTV Didn't Suck, a historical era even older than Back When MTV Actually Played Videos Once In A While.

The list so far includes a couple Flock of Seagulls tunes, Graham Parker's "Don't Bother with the Local Girls", the song (from Back When MTV Couldn't Even Get Any Advertisers) "Ghost Town" (anybody remember the name of the band?), Aldo Nova's "Fantasty", "Once in a Lifetime" by the Talking Heads (I can't believe I didn't like that song at first; I guess it becomes more relevant in your 20s and 30s than when you've just turned 10), "Six Months in a Leaky Boat" by Split Enz (though I saw a Wiggles version of it, too), and "Rainbow in the Dark" by Dio.

I'm anxious for more suggestions; use the comments thread.