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.
