First things first: Kristy Swanson is in this month’s Playboy, and she is so fine. I’ve always had a thing for her, so this day has been a long time coming.

Now that’s out of the way…

I did a little woodworking this weekend. I am making a frame to put my latest art project in. It has to be deep, almost like a shadow box, and 8.5” by 11”, so after looking around, I figured it would be better to just make the stupid thing than it would be to try to find one that size or have one made.

Basically, what I’ve got going on is that I’ve scanned this piece of Mucha art, took it into Photoshop, separated it out into layers, and printed the whole thing out on transparencies. Then I took the transparencies, mounted them 0.5” apart (there are three transparencies, for a total of 1” of depth - one sheet on the bottom, one sheet 0.5” above that, and one sheet 0.5” above that), and got glass and backing board to finish it off with. All told, I need about 1.5” of depth to work with.

Anyway, I routed out these poplar boards that I bought at Home Depot to make the frame proper, then took them over to my parents’ house to cut the 45° angles on my dad’s table saw.

I am not a carpenter by any means. I can do little stuff - like with a Dremel tool - but I can’t make, like, furniture or anything. Not that I don’t think I ever could, I just don’t have any experience.

That said, I got my dad to come out and show me how the saw works, and maybe do the cuts so that next time I’d know how to do it myself. There were only eight cuts to make, so I figured it’d take us like 20 minutes tops to cut all that out.

I forgot how perfectionistic my dad is.

It took us probably a good two hours to get those cuts made. The big problem was that the wood I bought wasn’t perfectly square (I paid like $3 a pop for it; I didn’t expect precision furniture-quality), and even though I told him so, I think it bugged him that the final cuts didn’t fit precisely together like a machined product. It’s good enough for me, but he puzzled over that forever, trying to make it square.

Don’t get me wrong - I totally appreciate what he was doing, and had I purchased better wood, it would have come out squared up and perfect down to the nanometer. But I bought shitty wood, so it didn’t. Anyway, it was entertaining to watch, if maybe just a tiny bit frustrating.

Jenn and I went to the Winter Hawks games on Friday and Saturday nights. Friday night we lost to Kelowna 2 to 1, but Saturday we wasted Vancouver 4 to 1. I was slightly disappointed by Friday’s game, except one of our players, Matt Fetzner, got into this terrific fight and totally just drilled this Kelowna guy in the face. No great fights on Saturday, but I was proud of our goalie, Lanny Ramage, who seemed to be off his game most of last season. Hopefully he can return to his previous glory this season.

During the game on Saturday night, I thought of a cool idea. (Yes, another idea like my Venetian Blinds Idea from a while back.) You know how you watch a hockey game on TV and they put a little light or something on the puck so it’s sort of outlined against the background and you can see it better? Okay, hold that thought for a sec.

Now, you know how they have access cards to get into buildings where you just sort of move the card in front of the sensor and it reads the card? Right.

Well, you put whatever is in those cards inside the puck and you put sensors under the ice. When the puck slides around on the ice, have whatever sensors detect the puck light up and it should simulate the “light” on the puck that you see on TV. Take it a step further and you could do that with the blades on the skates, too, to have a disco-style effect. Throw in some black lights or whatever and you’ve got a much more entertaining environment in which to skate.

Taking that back a notch, back to the original puck-light idea… I think that could work. It might not be allowed in regulation play, but for beginners or for recreational games, it would be great.

I’m going to a costume party at my friends Jason and Tracy’s house for Halloween, but that means I have to come up with a costume. Jenn is thinking of going as Alice from Alice in Wonderland (hey, Alice is a total hottie), but I’m not sure what I should be. I thought maybe I could be The Mad Hatter, but I’d need to find the hat and a suit like that. I also thought I might be a ninja, since I’ve actually always wanted a ninja costume, but then I wouldn’t match Jenn. I’m still thinking about it.

The American Idol Greatest Moments CD comes out tomorrow. For some reason I thought it was next month. Hmmm. Guess I’ll be hitting the store for that one in the morning.

A while ago I applied for a volunteer movie reviewer position at YouBored.com. I didn’t get it. I’ve read some of the latest reviews, presumedly from the guy who did get the position, and I can’t stand them. It’s not that the new guy can’t write, it’s that he writes reviews from that “greater-than-thou” platform that other movie critics write from, expecting high art and ultimate innovation from any movie they go to see. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to say they go see films, not movies. I disagree with nearly every movie critic out there specifically for that reason. I go see movies to be entertained, to have fun, to enjoy myself. If I came out smiling or feeling justified in spending the money to see it, I consider it good.

In fact, I have a sort of different five-star scale by which I rate movies:

• 5 Stars: See it for full price in the theater
• 4 Stars: See it during the matinee price in the theater; it’s good, but not worth full price
• 3 Stars: Rent it when it’s a new release; it’s not good enough for the theater, but you’ll want to see it when it’s out on video
• 2 Stars: Rent it once it’s off “new release” status; you might want to see it, but it’s worth closer to $0.99/week than $3.49/day
• 1 Star: Don’t bother. Not even worth the rental.

Most movies fit into the 3- or 4-Star range if I bother to see them. But the movies I put into the 5 Star range are never the movies that critics rate highly. Know why? Because I enjoy movies for the entertainment value regardless of whether they have any artistic value to them. Art’s good, but hey, sometimes a good formula shoot-em-up is just as fun.

The only critic I really agree with (and less these days than I used to) is The Self-Made Critic. Usually he likes the movies I like and doesn’t like the ones I don’t like. Lately he’s gotten a little more on the high-critic scale than he used to be. I wonder if that comes with having seen so many movies? I dunno; I’ve seen more movies than the average person, I’m sure, and I still enjoy them for the entertainment value. When I become too art-oriented and stop enjoying them for what they are - entertainment - someone just come over and shoot me.