Went to the movies once again over the weekend (gee what a surprise). Not really a whole lot out right now and I wasn’t in the mood for anything too serious so I went to go see the Gridiron Gang. I will just go ahead and admit that I am a fan of the Rock. After making that statement I feel as if I must add that I stopped watching “professional” wrestling when I was in 4th or 5th grade, I just think he makes a good action hero and can actually act halfway decently. I remember the first time I really saw him as more than a stupid wrestler was when he made an absolutely hilarious appearance on Saturday Night Live, the quit smoking skit in particular was classic. The Rundown was huge surprise for me as well, I enjoy that movie probably more than I have any business doing so; “you want the thunder or do you want the lightning?” cracks me up every time. Anyway, with Arnold getting old and becoming a shitty politician the world needed a new action hero and I can see The Rock filling the void, or maybe Vin.

I will keep this review pretty short. I will just say that you will probably see the exact movie that you think you are going to see when you walk into the theater. There are no big surprises or anything, it’s your run of the mill uplifting, facing your fears, becoming a better person football movie. That said, it’s a pretty decent one. The Rock does a decent job in his first real dramatic role and the rest of the cast isn’t bad either, I always like seeing Leon Rippy in movies. It was a nice touch seeing documentary footage of the real Sean Porter (the character the Rock is portraying) during the credits, looks like the did a good job of capturing the type of person that he is.

While looking up some stuff on imdb I just saw that the Rock has been cast as Johnny Bravo in the upcoming Johnny Bravo movie, sounds like a stroke of genius to me just wondering how they will do the hair.

There was recently a thread on Somethingawful about stupid mistakes we have made in our past but wont do again, the theme over at SA was to draw a picture in MS Paint of stupid things you have done. This thread reminded me of something which happened to me over the summer.

My dad was in town from Florida over fathers day weekend and myself, my brother and his family decided to take him to the zoo because, quite frankly, that is where my dad belongs. Ok, maybe he doesn’t belong in a zoo, although he does belong in some sort of bad joke hell because my dad is a fountain of really bad and corny jokes not to mention email forwards and their ilk. But I digress. So we went to the zoo and seeing how I hadn’t seen my dad in awhile I decided to get a haircut right before he got here so I could look all spiffy for him. For those of you who have never met me in person here is a photo montage of me getting a haircut

As should be painfully obvious by now I pretty much have no hair on my head (still have plenty on my ass though, go me) after a fresh haircut. So we head off to the zoo, me with a freshly shorn head, and proceed to walk around the zoo for roughly the next 17 hours. Sunscreen of course never even crossed my mind nor did wearing a hat. I should also mention that this was near the start of the summer so I didn’t really have any base coat or anything going on either, I was pale little white boy who spends entirely too much time under the wonderful glow of my computer monitor.

I was not happy camper that night. After the zoo we went back to my brothers house and we were just hanging out there, had some dinner, watched a movie. By the time we were watching the movie I was already peeling off long sections of my scalp. It is kind of weird pulling your skin off your head especially when you consider that the skin you peel off has tons of little holes in it from where you hair grows out (mine didn’t have nearly as many holes as I would like though, stupid going bald shitfest head). By the time the movie was over I had probably peeled off 80% of the skin from the top of my head and my head was very sensitive and tingly. I asked if my brother had any aloe so I could spread some of its soothingly delicious goodness over my scorched dome but alas they didn’t have any.

After the movie I headed home hoping that I had some aloe. I drove home with the top down in my car which was a very strange sensation. The cool night air blowing over what remained of my scalp alternated from feeling very good, sort of like a dip in a nice cool pool after a hard day of working out in the sun to feeling like being gently poked repeatedly all over the head with an ice pick. I would go from pure bliss to ouch motherfucker several times in the span of seconds. Being the masochist that I am I kind of enjoyed the overall sensation.

When I finally arrived home I looked and looked for aloe but had no luck finding any, but I did find a bottle of suntan lotion that contained aloe. I figured it wouldn’t be as good as pure aloe but I imagined that it would be better than nothing. I was wrong. Very Wrong. The pain was incredible. Imagine, if you will, getting 500 paper cuts on your arm. Now imagine someone coming along and pouring salt, lemon juice and, just to be on the safe side, hot sauce all over your bloody paper cuts. Then to further your agony having gasoline thrown into your face, getting in your eyes and nose and then having it all lit on fire while a 4 year old kid repeatedly punches you in the goodies. That may give you an idea of the kind of pain that I experienced when I put that shit on my head.

In summary, don’t be an idiot douchebag and walk around in the sun with very sensitive exposed skin for many hours without protecting yourself. If you are an idiot like me, under no circumstances put sunscreen containing aloe on your charred skin thinking that it will ease the pain. You would seriously be better off pouring some sort of corrosive acid on yourself.

I have a bit of love hate relationship with Zach Braff, 90% of the time I like him, he makes a good lovable goofball who I could totally see myself hanging out with, 10% of the time I want to I want to do disgusting things to him with gardening equipment. With that out of the way I would have to consider myself a fan though, I think he is quite funny on Scrubs (a show that I love) and I rather enjoyed Garden State so I figured I would enjoy The Last Kiss which I went to see over the weekend.

I didn’t really know anything about the movie other than what the above poster told me. I was thinking it had an interesting cast and for some reason my brain interpreted the poster as this move being a lighthearted romantic comedy. I was wrong. The movie did have an interesting cast who I thought were all strong in their roles but The Last Kiss is not a romantic comedy. The Last Kiss is a straight up drama and a fairly heavy one at that.

I enjoyed it for the most part. I found the characters for the most part to be believable; although Rachel Bilson’s (super cutie) character fell for “Michael” awfully fast and hard. The acting was good, I was particularly impressed with Blythe Danner (who is aging incredibly gracefully) and with Tom Wilkinson who is always good. While I am talking about actors make sure you watch for the Ghostbuster cameo

The movie isn’t without it’s faults though, it is rather generic and a bit lifeless. The relationship between Kim and Michael is forced with Kim acting in a way that just doesn’t make much sense to me. But they need that relationship for the movie to work so you just have to accept it as a plot device. I would love to meet a girl like Kim though and have her do to me what she did to him., but that’s just because it has been far too long since I got laid.

I wouldn’t say rush out and go see this film but I wouldn’t stop anyone from going to see it either. It’s a decent little film that I will probably forget about in a month.

Oh yeah, there are boobies in the movie which always helps.

I will start this off saying that I am a huge fan of Ed Norton, I think he is one of the finest actors working today and find that he almost always gives an outstanding performance. I feel similarly about his costar Paul Giamatti as well, he is always good (but he will always be pig vomit to me). When I first started seeing previews for the Illusionist is was intrigued, I have always had a bit of a soft spot for magicians and the mysterious so it looked right up my alley.

The movie is good, not great but a good solid movie. To overly discuss it would spoil it so I wont. I would just like to add that the acting is good, it’s not Ed Nortons best work but he still puts in a solid performance. Mr. Giamatti on the other hand is at the top of his game and is a pleasure to watch. I was kind of ho-hum on Ms. Biels performance, I am not a huge fan of hers but she was good enough, definitely wasn’t bad. Rufus Sewell, who I feel looks uncannily like Vincent Gallo, makes for a good villain.

This is a movie that could easily be put off until you see it on DVD but if it looks like something that you would like I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend going and checking it out.

I learned about the Rasterbator recently and was immediately intrigued. I knew that we were moving soon at work when I first found out about it so I immediately started thinking about how I could rasterbate all over the place.

For those of you who are too lazy to follow the link above and are wondering what the Rasterbator is and what it does it’s quite simple. With the Rasterbator you can take any picture you want and blow it up to any size that you want; you can make them HUGE. What the program actually does it blows the image up to whatever size you want and then spits out a PDF file. This PDF has however many pages that you specified for the size of your image, you then print the pages of this PDF on your every day computer printer, you can do either color or black and white, on regular 8 1/2″ by 11″ paper and once everything is printed you put all the pieces together to make a much bigger image.

While I had all sorts of ideas of what I wanted to do at work I knew that I had to be a bit careful if I wanted to be able to keep it up and not get in any trouble. I narrowed my choices down to about 5 but I finally ended up going with an image from The Shining. Below is a picture of it from about 15 feet away.

It turned out good, not great but good. I learned a lot doing my first Rasterbation. Tip 1: Use the highest resolution source image you can find, the bigger the better is the deal here. Mine looks good but I know it would look better if I had used a higher resolution source image. Tip 2: if you are going to cut out all the white parts between the sheets of paper you want to make sure that you cut your lines as straight as possible and keep all of your pieces of paper a uniform size. I had no problem keeping my cuts straight thanks do this awesome little toy that a woman at work let me borrow, this thing was a life saver. my problem was that I didn’t keep the pieces of paper the same exact size. Even if the pieces of paper are just a bit different in size it will screw you up when you tape everything back together, mine were close by my finished rasterbation has some little errors and doesn’t exactly lie flat against the wall.

Here is a close up of my image, you can click the image for a larger version.

And here is a real close up to show you what the image looks like up close (where it loses it’s magic).

Pretty cool huh? I am thinking I am going to leave it up at work for a month or two and then make a new one and try and keep the cycle going. That is assuming that work doesn’t make me take it down which I hope they don’t.

You should check out the gallery at the official Rasterbator web page, they have some really cool images.