An Age Old Question

One of the great things about Netflix is the risk you can take on a movie. You can watch absolute shit and feel okay about since you didn't fork over between $2 and $8 to see it.

The downside is you are prone to watching absolute shit.

The shitfest that Emily and I subjected ourselves to on Friday night was Legally Blond 2.

Wow. I am pretty easy to please with movies like these since I have zero expectations. But this was particularly bad. Which poses the age-old question: What is the worst sequel ever? The only presupposition is that the first movie has to be redeeming. So a movie like Porky's 2 is out. But I liked Legally Blond quite a bit. It was pure formula but it was still entertaining. I can say nothing good about Legally Blond 2.

Off the top of my head I can think of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Back the the Future II as two other tremendously disappointing sequels. Oh and Bourne Supremacy was shit; I liked Bourne Identity quite a bit.

Now that I think of it, the list goes on and on...
The Matrix sequels
Analyze That
All those Home Alone sequels
Blues Brothers 2000

An equally challenging question is what is the best sequel? The only presupposition here is that it's not part of pre-planned trilogy so Two Towers and Empire Strikes Back are out. Terminator 2 and Aliens would be my finalists and it's hard to say which one I like better.

Maybe it's time resurrect my Top Five Lists blog.

Oh and for the record. Friday was a double-feature in the Nawrocki-Parker household. We watched Pieces of April after Legally Shitty 2. And to end this post on a positive note, Pieces of April is excellent. I highly recommend it.

What's Next? A Pro Wrestler Will Be Governor?

Kinky Friedman will announce on Thursday that he is running for governor of Texas. He's no Anne Richards but he's bound to be 100 times better than Governor Perry.

Click here for the story.

Gorged By A Nerd

Or perhaps I should A Nerd Is By A Gorge. So I wrote a week ago that I was about to post my nerdiest post to date. This post should outdo that one, as well as Emily's most recent post, which is also drenched in geekiness.

I just learned that in all of the 2300+ miles of the Mississippi, it has only carved out one gorge. And that gorge is less than half a mile from our house. That sounds kind of cool, but when you think that the gorge extends for several miles, you realize probably 10,000 people can make the same claim.

And there is only one naturally occurring waterfall along the Big River. And that would be St. Anthony Falls, in downtown Minneapolis. Of course it's not a coincidence that a major city based on the milling industry would be centered on these falls. I am reaclling this next factoid from memory, so I may be wrong, but the St. Anthony Falls keep moving back, towards the north. The falls are visibly in a different location than 100 years ago.

And why is "waterall" singular but "the falls" plural when they both refer to the same thing?


Image from greatgreenriver.org

I also learned that it takes 90 days for a raindrop that falls in Lake Itasca (the river's source) to make its way to the Gulf of Mexico.

I am off to shine my pocket protector.

You Can Take the Boy Out of the Country

But you can't take the country out of the.... Oh fuck it that doesn't apply to me anyway, seeing as how I grew up in a suburb and my parents are from Indiana and Ohio.

But I just took this quiz that asks you questions about how you pronounce words and what you call certain things (like the whole Coke vs. pop vs. soda controversey).

Click here to take the "Yankee or Dixie" quiz.

So I figured my dialect would place me right in the middle of the Blue Grey divide, since I have been living or going to college in the heartland. So I was very surprised when I came up with a score of 72% Dixie. Who knew I was such a cracker?

I think I must have really scored high on the Dixie scale when I said I call carbonated beverages "Coke" instead of "pop" (although I have been using the term "pop" more and more) and still use the term "ya'll." But I am about as Dixie as Ted Kenndedy, or George "I Went To Andover and Yale" Bush, for that matter.



Image from The E Pupluribus Unum Project


And as an aside, I think the strangest thing from when I first began college was that grocery stores would actually use the term "pop" in their ads. Now it seems normal.

Ya'll come back. I'm fixin' to write another post in two shakes.

Name That Genre

Be forewarned. This may be my geekiest, most pretentious post to date, and that's saying something.

Yesterday afternoon I was flipping through the channels and stumbled across the opening scene to Raging Bull. Three things struck me.

First, it was startling to see such a young Robert DiNiro.

Secondly, I always want to change the title of Raging Bull to "Ragging Bull" because that is how I saw it misspelled some 15 years ago and I can't get that misspelling out of my head.

And lastly, I was struck by how similar Raging Bull is to other movies like Goodfellas and Boogie Nights. The Horatio Alger story is definitely a cornerstone of American storytelling, but it seems as if there is a darker subgenre, that goes a little something like this:

1. Young male grows up in a broken home in an urban area with little upward mobility.
2. As he comes of age he finds success, fame, lots of women, and fortune in a seedy industry, be it boxing, organized crime, or porn.
3. As the charachter and his career age, he can't let go of his youth. He flies too close to the sun and comes crashing down, aided by a drug and alchohol addiction.
4. He sometimes also has a wife to go along with all of his girlfriends. The wife receives physical and emotional abuse and is a fairly sympathetic charachter.

I only saw it once, but there is a James Cagney movie from the 30s, Public Enemy Number One (no word if Chuck D and Flavor Flav are planning a remake), but even back then this movie had a few of the elements of a darkened Horatio Alger story. Maybe it's the predecessor.

Are there any other movies like this? Is this already a prescribed genre and I am just slow to realize it?

I remember when Boogie Nights came out I told my sister how much it reminded me of Goodfellas. She told me she had read a review of Boogie Nights that said pretty much the same thing and renamed the Marky Mark movie Woodfellas. Funny stuff.

Advertise Your Tiny Penis to the World for the Tiny Price of $115,000.00!!!!

A picture is worth 1000 words



Ugh. How many things are wrong with this picture?

Maybe this is dated news, but I still can't get the fact that this beast is on the market as a passeneger truck. If it literally weighed ONE POUND more, you'd need a professional truck driver's license to drive it. But as it stands, even a 16 year-old with $90,000.00 burning a hole in his pocket and a freshly minted driver's license can legally drive this truck on a congested highway in a blizzard. Kick ass.

Click here for the full story. As you can read, the Navistar gets six to 10 miles per gallon and can cost up to $115,000.00 (air brakes included). In all fairness, the Navistar has a limited release of like 50 trucks, but that is still 50 too many.

You could save a lot of money by simply walking around town in a neon t-shirt that says, "CHECK ME OUT!! I Have A Lot of Money, But No Self-Esteem And/Or Regard For Others."

A lawyer would probably tell me otherwise, but I honestly believe you could make a case for vehicular homicide if a driver of a sedan gets crushed by an inexperienced Navistar driver. Or at least it would make for an intriguing episode of Law and Order.

Don't Be Hanging Your Life On A Wall

Or so sings the Texas troubador, Guy Clark. And Ed Whitlock embodies this song.

For those of you who, like me, need a little inspiration to get back into shape, and whose athletic peak seems like and abstraction rather than a goal, I offer you Mr. Whitlock.

Ed Whitlock is 72 years old and in 2004 he ran a 2:54 marathon. Click here for the story. For the record, that is four minutes faster than my best marathon. Running Times just did a small piece on Whitlock. If you age-graded his marathon time to that of a 30 year-old's, his time is 2:03. Unbelievable.

For those of you who are illiterate when it comes to interpreting running times, consider these numbers: the world record in the marathon is just under 2:05. And, a 2:54 equals an average of faster than 6:40 miles.

His other 2004 times are equally impressive. His 5k (3.1 miles) was 18:22 and 10k (6.2) was 37:33. Unless you ran for a certain rural Iowa college, I seriously doubt the remaining three readers of this blog can come within 5 minutes of these times. Did I mention he's 72 years-old?

Don't be hanging your life on a wall.