Great Scene from Spies Like Us...

In getting ready for the Holiday season ahead, I am going to dust off the Checy Chase classic Christmas Vacation, and to get in the mood, I watched a littl Spies Like Us. I miss these days of Chevy Chase

Good Times...

I love the movie Old School, and a friend of mine just sent me this clip...

In-N-Out, Went In Then Out

Wow, talk about a heart attack waiting to happen. On my way to the airport from Los Angeles, I had to make the obligatory journey to the ever famous In-N-Out Burger. Not knowing all the special codes to ordering at In-N-Out I was lucky to have an insider there who knew all the special handshakes, and told me to order "Animal Style". Not knowing what this meant, I worried I was about to be taken into the back room where a banjo would be playing while a red ball is shoved into my mouth with someone in the background saying "Bring out the Gimp". So assuming that only happens in the movies, I boldly ordered Animal Style and crossed my fingers, and subconsciously clinched my butt cheeks.

Needless to say I did not wake up in a back alley with a sore backside and the smell of ether on my breath, so it was a win from that perspective. I am never disappointed when that does not happen, so my trip to the airport was rather uneventful. If you have never experienced Animal Style before from In-N-Out Burger, I highly recommend that you pick one up if you have the means. I just don't recommend that you do it right before you get on a 5 hour flight. Poor planning on my part. So as I am boarding the plane, I feel the notorious stomach gurgle that tells me everything in my digestive track instantly became liquefied and is going to need an emergency evacuation within the next half hour. Problem is, the first leg of my flight home was a two and a half hour flight. I do not know about you, but dropping a dos (Spanish for poop) in an airline toilet is not my idea of a good time, for me or the other passengers.

So fresh out of Depends, I decided to fight the good fight and do the male version of Kegel exercises contracting and relaxing the sphincter muscle so as not to leave an unwrapped present on the airplane seat. Let me just tell you, that a two and a half hour flight is already long, but a two and a half hour flight when you are on the brink of having a blowout so intense that it could spark the FAA to permanently ground the plane is even longer. The good news is that I made it to the Dallas Fort Worth Airport with a little time to spare, and the bad news is I think the bathroom attendant can forget about mom for a while, because he has something new to talk about with his therapist.

Day Ten: It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

So I thought I would zig when you thought I would zag, and by the suggestion of a friend of mine from work, I decided to mix it up a little and go family-style with my last review of the 10 Days of Horror. There is something charming about It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Maybe it is the background elevator music, or the poorly drawn backgrounds, or the fact that Charlie Brown gets shit on at every turn.

I am not sure the reason, but I have been watching this every Halloween ever since I was a kid, back when it was on CBS every year, and then on DVD for the last few years.

There is so much to love about this show that I am not going to go through it all here, but I will touch on a few of the things that stand out to me every time I watch this. For one, this episode includes a brief glimpse at the Snoopy vs. Red Baron rivalry that I have loved ever since the Royal Guardsman song that I used to listen to back on my record player from when I was a kid. I loved that song so much that I ruined the record that I had by listening to it over and over again. I used to sit on the top bunk of my bunk beds and pretend that I was Snoopy going after the Red Baron. I would play the song on my record player, and hop up onto the top bunk of my bed, and when the song was over, I would start it all over again. I also love the multiple-eyed ghost costume of Charlie Brown that has become so iconic for peanuts, there is the "pull the ball away from Chuck as he tries to kick it" hoax that appears in almost every episode of Peanuts. I love the pitter-patter sound of the kids when they run, and the "excitement" audio track of all the kids talking at once.

There are not many cartoons made like this today, and I am not referring to the artistry, but more for the story and the non-pc nature of the series. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of cheese on this biscuit, but it does not prevent me from falling in love with this show every year when I watch it. If you could not tel from the review, I highly recommend watching this one.

So concludes my 10 Days of Horror... or I guess 9 Days of Horror, and one day of Halloween nostalgia. See you next year.

Day Nine: The Blair Witch Project

I will be the first to admit that I totally got wrapped up in the hype of this movie leading up to its release. In my opinion this movie had some of the best marketing to ever accompany a movie. I think the biggest problem with this movie is the people that did not get into the web hype that built up before the movie was released in the theatres.



The thing is, the movie was presented to people as a real-life story of three documentarians that went off in the woods in search of footage of the Blair Witch of Burkittsville, Maryland. A web-site was launched way before the movie was released, to stir up interest in the movie. The web-site had "unedited" video content to show some incidents and interviews of people that came into contact at some point with the people making the documentary. The website also contained tons of information on the mythology of the Blair Witch, and the history of the "real-life" accounts and police reports that led to the mythology. I knew soooo many people that bought into the chance that this may be a true story. The only mistake that the movie-makers made, in my opinion, was to have the actors and actress playing the documentarians make an appearance on the David Letterman show a day or two before the movie released.



Sitting in the theatres on the first day it was released, I was surrounded by tons of people, more than half of which believed that this was a true story. I do not want to spend the time in this blog about how people actually believed this was a true story, but still think that was brilliant on the movie-makers part, to know that the population would believe that the story was real.



The movie on its own is only marginally good. It is just some kids walking around the woods getting into arguments and hearing noises at night. It played heavily on the hopes of the website building the premise and the mood, which worked during the initial theatre run of the movie. Watching this movie again, I began to get pulled into the original spectacle that was the Blair Witch. I can imagine that if someone did not get to experience the original website before the movie was released back in 1999, then the movie is probably pretty boring and even irritating up until the movie pick up around 45 minutes in.


I am pretty torn about this movie, mainly because I am now watching it almost ten years after it was released, and a lot of my feelings about this movie are related to that original experience leading up to the theatre release. The movie does play on your emotions. If you have ever been camping, then the thought of getting lost scares the hell out of you. If you have ever heard noises in the middle of the night while camping then you also know how scary that is. The movie on the surface is not very scary until the end, and each character does a pretty good job of being realistic in their meltdowns and paranoia. I find it hard to recommend this movie, unless you have already seen it in its originally intended context with the website supplement.


Click here to view more reviews of The Blair Witch Project

Day Eight: The Lost Boys

So when I was 13, I was introduced to the world of vampires through the movie The Lost Boys. Now, when I was 13, this movie may have been the coolest movie I had seen up to that time. For a boy of that age, it was oozing with coolness and just made you want to become a vampire, even if it meant dealing with longer finger nails, bad breath, and sleeping all day. At the time, it would not have changed the way my summer was passing anyway.

Rewatching the movie has not really changed anything for me. I still think it is simmering in a nice coolness broth that keeps the movie afloat and makes you forget about the absurdity of the story. Besides all the jokes that may surface about the presence of the brothers Corey, this movie cannot help itself, it is just utter coolness.

So if you followed the career of Kieffer Sutherland, you know that he has peaked in popularity two different times in his career, and this movie may have been the apex of his first brush with ultimate badass stature. The second being during his run of 24. Obviously the brothers Corey took a different career path after this movie, both in the wrong direction, but that is another article waiting to be written. One of the things that I like about vampire movies (when they are good vampire movies) is that there is no set mythology when it comes to vampires. There are some pretty standard things: going out in daylight, garlic, stakes to the heart, etc. But even those get changed from story to story (see Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Series). So accepting that the mythos changes from movie to movie is a pre-requisite for enjoying a good vampire movie. The Lost Boys follows most of them and they even use them as heavy plot devices throughout the movie, and as part of the story.

I will say that I could probably watch this movie 100 times (and I probably have) and it would still be cool and not get old to me. It is really hard to pinpoint the reasoning behind the movie's draw, but I think that it has something to do with the actors/actresses that play the characters are all good. Jason Patric, Kieffer Sutherland, Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, Dianne West, Jamie Getz, and Edward Hermann at the time was not too large of a cast, but in retrospect turns out to be a great group of actors/actresses that keep the movie grounded.

The movie seems to use a lot of the stereotypical horror movie components: Dark lighting during situations that would most likely be well lit, the kooky older character that ends up knowing more than he lets on (grandpa), the off-balance characters that seem to know too much about the situation to keep the plot moving forward (Frog brothers), and the hot girl that lures the characters into action (Gertz). All-in-all, this movie is deeply enjoyable with a good mix of scares, humor, and connection with the characters. I highly recommend this movie.

Click here to read reviews of The Lost Boys

Day Seven: Amityville Horror (1979)

So cruising along through day seven of the ten and I am starting to get comfortable again. I think that I am starting to realize that older horror movies do not age well. Maybe it is something about the music, the effects, the 70s style porn hair and clothing, but for some reason to me these older movies just do not age well when it comes to the fright factor. I think there is an exception to this from time to time, in the cases of movies like The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, Psycho, and Suspiria, to name a few.

I decided to watch Amityville Horror to see if this could also be an exception to the rule when it comes to older movies. Now I have not seen the newer version with Ryan Reynolds, so I do not know how well the material and story has done over the years, but the 1979 James Brolin/Margot Kidder version does not hold up well in my opinion. Again, this is my opinion, but I honestly had a hard time not laughing at points in this movie.

Normally, the scariest movies in my opinion are the ones that deal with religion and/or emotional issues. I am not usually frightened by the "chasing you through the woods" or slasher style movies. If there is paranormal involved, and things outside the realm of the normal, that usually has the best chance of getting to me. That being said, this movie does play heavily in the religious/demon realm and yet it did nothing to disturb me in the least. Granted if these types of things were happening to me in real life I would probably need to strap on some Depends.

My problem is not in the fact that these types of things just simply do not happen in real life, because that is part of the attraction in my opinion, but my problem is when the human responses do not seem to be very realistic or authentic based on the events happening. I just don't see some of the reactions occurring the way they do in this movie. I know that I would react completely different than any of the characters in the movie, so if I cannot connect with the characters or the events taking place in the movie, then you can usually count me out.

I am really interested in the newer version of the movie, because I think that the material translates well to being scary in any age, but this version failed to connect with me, and that will make me not recommend this movie to any friends. People I don't like.... maybe.

Click here to read reviews of the original Amityville Horror

Day Six: Shaun of the Dead

I really hate it when people review a horror movie and try and tell you that it is a social commentary about the current times. For example, the movie Dawn of the Dead (the original) is often referred as a social commentary of the time. As taken from Roger Ebert's review of the movie: "Their eventual fates are not as interesting as their behavior in the meantime; there is nothing quite like a plague of zombies to wonderfully focus your attention on what really matters to you. Romero has his own ideas, too, and the shopping center becomes a brilliant setting for a series of comic and satiric situations: Some low humor, some exquisitely sly." I cannot stand this. The movie is a horror movie and is just trying to scare people. It is not social commentary. Okay, I feel better now.

That being said, Shaun of the Dead is a social commentary on the state of the world and the zombie-like way that people go about their daily lives. The movie opens up to Shaun (Simon Pegg) getting ready for his day at work and then progresses through a normal day in the life of Shaun. This includes walking by people on the street on his way to the convenience mart, completely oblivious to his surroundings and others people's presence, as those he passes are likewise completely oblivious to Shaun's presence. It includes a ride on the bus to his work surrounded in the bus by people that are just going through the motions, rather zombie-like. It includes sitting at a local pub with his friends after work surrounded by others that are just hanging around the bar in a daze, again rather zombie-like. It cleverly pokes fun of other horror films along the way, sometimes subtle, and sometimes by crashing the absurdity of horror films over your head in hopes to sever our zombie-like brains from the stem. Even when it is not subtle, it is not as silly or ridiculous as the Scary Movie franchise, and does not lose its credibility in its delivery.

Generally, I am on the fence when it comes to zombie movies. I really like 28 Days Later, but I really hated 28 Weeks Later. I really like the original Dawn of the Dead, but cannot stand Land of the Dead. I think Shaun of the Dead is a clever movie, has some decent horror aspects to it, and is just an overall fun movie to watch. The acting is really good, the pace is perfect for the buildup to the zombie scenes, and the satire is thick, but not too thick to prevent enjoyment of the movie. I highly recommend it whether you like OR loathe zombie movies.

Click here to read reviews of Shaun of the Dead

Day Five: Lady in White

So the last few days I feel like I have hit stride in my quest for ten days of horror. I hit a small speed bump with Children of the Corn, and since then I recovered well with The Frighteners and Sweeney Todd, so I felt like I needed to keep the momentum going. I have owned Lady in White by Frank LaLoggia for a few years now, and never got around to watching this on DVD. I think that I have seen this movie close to ten times on HBO when I was growing up back in the late 80s, early 90s.

The funny thing is that with all the times I have seen the movie, I do not remember the first ten minutes at all. Maybe I never watched the first ten minutes before since it was on HBO, I probably came in late each time watching it. Without the cable box built-in guide, we had to rely on TV Guide or the local paper for our show times, so catching a movie on time often didn't happen unless you rented the movie.

So I wanted to do this movie mainly because I have great memories of it from when I was a child, and because it takes place over Halloween. The story centers around Frankie Scarlatti (played by Lukas Haas), a budding author in grade school who is considered weird by his fellow students. He begins to have visions of a young girl that had some traumatic experience that somehow links to his life.

I really like this movie... it has the typical 80s fluff feel but still manages to also have a more ominous presence to it. This was a pretty low budget independent film, but does not show it. The movie's effects for the time are really good, the acting in the movie is probably as good as you're going to get for kids, and the adult acting is perfectly serviceable. This movie provides you with a relatively good twist, back from a time where twists were not yet trendy. The twist really pays off because of the time and effort that is taken in telling the story and setting up the characters. Even though I would not classify this movie as a true Horror, I truly recommend this movie for anybody trying to get into the Halloween mood.

Click here to read reviews of Lady in White

Day Four: Sweeney Todd

So I saw a live play version of this story in Chicago some years back, and I have been hesitant to see the movie for fear that I would not be able to enjoy it due to a bias from my younger years of seeing it on stage. My memories of Sweeney Todd on stage is not only a great memory, but it is how I lost my virginity to stage productions. So as they say, you always remember your first.

The one bright point that has always attracted me to the film version was that it was being done by Tim Burton (and we would get to hear Johnny Depp and Sacha Cohen sing). I thought that if anyone could capture the mood of the and translate it to the silver screen, it could only be Burton.

Much to my surprise, the movie is rather enjoyable, and also captures the original emotion that I remember from the play. Burton brings his signature sets and darkness to the play in a way that makes you feel like the story was written to be made by him specifically.

As would be expected, Johnny Depp immerses himself into the role of Sweeney Todd, the barber that was wrongly convicted by a judge that had plans for his wife. Once returned from exile, Todd comes to find that his wife has poisoned herself, launching Todd into a plan for revenge that would lead to a lot of slit throats and meat pies. I couldn't help but eat a shepherd's pie immediately following the movie. The other actors/actresses in the film are just as good at selling their roles. Helena Bonham Carter and Alan Rickman are both very convincing in their interpretations as Mrs Lovett and the Judge respectively. Sacha Baron Cohen casts off his comical leash and gets the opportunity to show off his acting chops. Even though his role is short-lived (literally), he shines as the over-the-top street peddling barber.

Without giving too much away for the sake of those that have not seen the movie, I will not go too deeply into the spoiling of the plot. I will just highly recommend this movie to all that would like to see a musical horror movie (not that it isn't a bit of a contradiction from the realm of Hollywood) over this spooky holiday season. Just know that you are going to get the Burton and Depp that you have come to expect, and while some of the original material from the musical is cut (I assume for the sake of time, since the movie comes in just over 2 hours long), be sure that this version is a loyal, albeit fantastic, representation of the Sondheim original.

See Reviews for the movie Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Day Three: The Frighteners

So after a setback on day two of the 10 Days of Horror, I pushed on to try and finish out the final eight days of my movie marathon. I think people have been feeling my pain after watching Children of the Corn yesterday, because they have been walking up to me with Dixie cups filled with watered-down Gatorade and towels to wipe myself down with. So as the marathon continues and I fight through the movie cramps that pop up during my trek, I keep looking ahead to better movies.

So hoping to rebound from the last movie, I decided to go with a little lighter fare and watch a "horror" movie that is a little more fun. I chose The Frighteners by Peter Jackson, which I think often times gets lost in the shuffle of good horror movies because it is actually a good all-around film. This was also Peter Jackson's first non-independent film so it gave him the budget to use around 500 CG shots, leading to his first thoughts of creating the Lord of the Rings films that he would make a few years later.

The film opens with a death in an eerie house in the middle of a thunderstorm. After the death we cut to a news writer creating a story about many recent deaths, and referring to death as an entity casting a dark shadow over the town. So in the span of 7 minutes Jackson does a wonderful job of setting the tone, introducing his main character, and describing the central theme to the story. So the story centers around Frank (Michael J. Fox), a psychic detective that can see and communicate with dead people (pre-Sixth Sense). He uses this ability to con people into thinking their houses are haunted, so that he can come in and charge them money for "cleaning" their house. So that the movie does not slip into the ranks of pure comedy, we learn that Frank can see an emblazoned number on the foreheads of "death's" victims. That number comes to represent the order in which the people are dying within the town. The story intensifies as it progresses and while it never completely loses its humor, it definitely becomes darker in tone as the movie works its way toward the conclusion.

The movie, like most Jackson films, is very well-made. The camera angles, the lighting, the effects, and the story are all great. I often forget how great of an actor that Michael J. Fox was before he became sick. He definitely has a style to his acting that carries over from role to role, but I always believed he was the character he was playing.

I really like this movie, I think it is fun and engaging, and while it never takes itself too seriously, it still manages to create thrills and scares throughout the movie. I highly recommend this movie as not a hardcore horror movie, but a fun thriller that can clean the funk off of a Corny scary movie. Pun intended.

Click Here to See Reviews for The Frighteners

Some Call It Women's Intuition, I Call It a Bald Man's Dream

As a man that prefers baldness to a bad hairline, I spend a lot of time in the shower during the week making sure that my head is evenly shaved. This poses a time management issue for me as well as an internal struggle weighing the pros and cons of taking the time to look like a hardass vs. just letting it grow out and getting a haircut once a month like a normal person.

So one of the major problems with shaving my head is that I am a perfectionist and if there is any stubble in a particular area I will keep shaving that section from different angles until the area is smooth. Well needless to say, this leads to a razor burn that would rival the sting of Casanova's urination in his later years.

I was going through my normal beautification process yesterday morning while getting ready for a visit to a customer location. I decided that it would be as good a day as any for shaving my head (due to the razor burn, I try and limit this ritual to once every three days or so). It was at this point that I encountered a slight problem. My current razor (and as I found out, my only remaining razor) was so dull that I could have shaved with sandpaper and gotten the same result. Well normally I would accept this as a defeat and move on to fight the razor burn another day. The only problem is that I realized how dull my razor was only after shaving a nice path down the middle of my head. Not the smartest place to start shaving, but I digress. So in a panic I made a quick decision that resulted in a wonderful life-altering event that I will now store up on the shelf beside memories of my first Brazilian wax, and that one Christmas where I woke up and found my taxi-cab yellow Western Flyer bicycle with the banana seat.

In my haste, I grabbed my wife's Intuition razor and started shaving away. After about 10 swipes that felt like nothing was happening on my head, I ran my fingers along my head to assess the stubble factor where the razor had been. To my ultimate surprise there was no stubble, and better yet, I felt nothing on my head.

I thought this must be too good to be true, so I proceeded to continue shaving in some of the harder areas on my head that consistently result in razor burn (So much so that I can usually feel the onset of razor burn as I am shaving the area). No matter how hard I tried, and no matter where I shaved, it was like a dream... no razor burn, and best of all, it was so smooth that it felt as if I was just running lotion over my head.

At this point I felt as if I had just discovered the secret handshake to get into that tree house I had been eyeing my whole childhood. I felt like I knew the secret hand gesture to women that shave with intuitions, similar to the little hand gesture you always see bikers and volkswagen drivers give each other when they pass on the road.

So instead of the morning fog that usually hangs around in my head for a good hour to start my morning, I felt a little lighter on my feet (could've just been the weight loss of shaving the hair from my head) and had a positive outlook on the day. So I feel the need to interrupt my 10 Days of Horror series to make sure that the men out there everywhere can benefit from my discovery.

Next Article: Shaving yourself to better aerodynamics...

Day Two: Children of the Corn

So day two hits and I feel like I am already hitting the wall. Maybe I should have ended with Suspiria, but already viewing Suspiria yesterday has led me to try and find the eject button to this ten day madness. I am not sure what I think that I saw in this movie back when I originally saw it, but this movie is not very good.

So the premise goes something like this. Some kids decide to kill all the people in the town older than 19 years of age. Then at an undisclosed time in the near future some travlers happen upon the town by accident. Why? Because surprisingly they decided to not stay on the main highway and wanted to sight-see. Horror ensues.

So there are some eerie scenes in the movie that do make you think twice about walking into a cornfield. In fact, I just recently went to a pumpking patch with the whole fam damily and wouldn't you know they had the obligatory corn maze. Now it never fails that whenever I go through a corn maze, I cannot help but think about Children of the Corn. So I guess on some level the movie has stuck with me over time, which I guess is half the battle. I think the fact that I saw this movie while I was a kid might say something about the fact that it scared me and has since stuck with me, but now as an adult (in body only) I feel that the charm and original fear that the movie delivered is no longer there.

So there I was watching this movie, and instead of being engulfed by it or scared from the scenes, I am sitting there picking apart the movie scene by scene. Which in my mind says something about the movie. So I find it interesting that the kids in the town kill all the adults, yet no one in the neighboring towns seems to care. In fact, the only link the movie has to the outside world, besides our two protagonists, is an old man at the gas station who oddly enough has done nothing about the fact that the kids are now ruling the town in their post-murderous rampage. I mean seriously, tell the next delivery man of gasonline that the psycho kids have killed everyone. Pick up that square thing that has the rotary dialer and call the number of the police (pre-911).

Not to mention that when I was a kid, anyone looking like Isaac would have been beaten on and made fun of... not followed by the a townfull of kids. Now I was not the type that would have done the beating, but I would have been the type to do the laughing when some other kid gave him an atomic wedgie... oh well. I guess the main moral of this story is beat on the nerdy kid, and when you get older, never leave the highway to sight-see. Check, and check.

So with problems like these floating around in my head I often have a hard time taking a movie seriously. So tomorrow I really have nowhere to go but up. I am not sure if I meant to do this, but two movies in a row, I have seen an actor/actress in their younger form before they became famous. This movie's star in the making was Linda Hamilton (pictured right), now known from her Terminator fame. Now obviously she became more famous than Udo Kier from Suspiria, but still, I sense a theme emerging.

Read Children of the Corn Reviews Here

Day One: Suspiria

So last night I snuggled up to my blanky and my dark home theater for the first day in my lonely horror-fest. I thought I would watch a movie that I have not seen in a while. Suspiria is one of those films that upon first viewing seems very campy, but upon subsequent views becomes a very engaging and powerful film. The story opens with an American dance student arriving in Germany to attend a dance school when all sorts of craziness and horror begin unfolding.

One of the best things about the film is the vivid imagery and use of colors. I swear that M. Night Shymalangadingdong must have taken extensive notes on Argento's use of light and color to accentuate a mood and scene within a film. The color red has a very powerful presence within Suspiria that often times makes you want to check your television color settings, but ultimately gives the viewer a feeling of anxiousness and paranoia.

You will have a hard time trying to find a movie with as much randomness as Suspiria. The movie pulls you in and out of scenes quickly to create a confusion, but then drags out scenes to create tension and suspense. It is almost as if you are being given a virtual sense of schizophrenia through the use of editing and musical score. Argento uses music to help heighten the uneasiness within each scene by providing scenes completely void of music when regular plot items are occurring, then pouring on the psychedelic Goblins score to an extreme level whenever something is about to occur.

In short, the acting is definitely sub-par and the story is pretty basic, but the imagery and direction of the film is outstanding enough to hoist this movie into my top ten horror films. It seems every time I watch this movie my appreciation for it increases and it overtakes another movie on my top ten list.

For those of you that like to see younger versions of actors they have seen in popular movies, a bonus is that it has a much younger Udo Kier (pictured left) in the movie playing a psychiatrist, and if you do not know who this is, he is Ron Camp in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

Check Out Suspiria Reviews Here

10 days of 10 Horror Movies

So I am going to try and live the dream over the next ten days. I am going to attempt to watch 10 horror movies leading up to Halloween. I am not sure which ones I am going to watch yet, but I will give a not-so-official review of each one over the next few days. In the meantime, I have posted in the right-hand column what I currently feel are my top ten horror movies of all-time. I am sure I have forgotten some but these are definitely in my wheel-house when it comes to the fright-flicks.

Commence the Halloween Shenanigans

GeoTagged, [N40.03234, E83.17400]

So this weekend marked the beginning of the Griswold... I mean Poole, holiday season. Three months, four holidays. Let the good times roll. So I am not sure what is normal for most families seeing as I said bye-bye to normal a long time ago, but my household loves Halloween. It is probably the most celebrated holiday in my family. From the decorations outside, to Trick-or-Treat, to costume parties, and horror movies, it is definitely a blast. I read somewhere that Halloween is now the second biggest, from a retail perspective and I surely contribute a sizable chunk to that statistic.

Well tonight we cooked up a Halloween feast. We made witch's finger breadsticks, pumpkin pie dip, a cheeseball in the shape of a pumpkin, and buried cupcakes. Once we finished watching the Buckeyes dismantle the Spartans, we started with the festivities. After eating we decided to watch Ghostbusters to kick off the frightfest. I know it is not very scary, but it is a classic and the kids love it, so a good starting point. This also gave me the chance to try out the iPhone Blogger Pro application. After Ghostbusters we turned up the horror movie quotient just a bit and watched Children of the Corn. I also rented Sweeney Todd to see how it rates vs. the play version. More on that later.

On the Road Again

Nothing like 9 hours in a car to end your week. So the week started with a speeding ticket from an aerial speed trap where I got a ticket for doing 87 in a 65, when curiously I had my cruise control set to 72. Now after being pulled over with errant data, I obviously was not in a good mood. So I decided to ask the trooper why I was pulled over for going 87 when I was only going 72 and he did not like the question. He told me if I wanted to dispute it I was more than welcome, but there is not much I can do since I do not have a witness. So needless to say we are basically giving people who require no higher education the ability to have a ridiculous amount of power and control over our lives. Now granted I was technically speeding, but now I have to pay a ticket for going 22 over the limit as opposed to 7 (which probably would not have led to a ticket to begin with, but I digress).

So back to the original reason I was posting this message. I went to the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana today, which is actually a really nice campus. I almost ran over ten people (not all at once, that would be crazy) and it reminded me how much I loved my stint at THE Ohio State University. So traveling sucks... obviously one would love to just fly to a location that would take 4 1/2 hours to drive to in each direction, but seeing as how I could leave from my home at 6:30am and drive to Illinois, do a demo, then drive back by 7:30pm. Or I could leave from my home at 5:00am for a 6:30am flight to Chicago, followed by an 8:00am flight to Urbana, then a 6:00pm flight back to Chicago connecting to Columbus at 8:45pm and landing by 11:00pm. Not to mention taking the chance that my demo equipment might not arrive with me. So I took the driving option, getting paid mileage, which ended up cheaper for my company than buying airline tickets so the day ended in a win-win situation.

The Battle of the Fruit Flies

So for those of you who are not familiar with my home life, I just recently installed hardwood floors into my house. During the 2 month long process (Lumber Liquidators mills messed up the finish on our wood) our house was a disaster area with our furniture in the garage, a layer of dust that rivaled the Pompeii aftermath, and some kitchen disorganization. One such disorganization centered around a forgotten bunch of onions within one of our kitchen cupboards. Well needless to say I may have forgotten them, but the fruit flies decided to have a rotten-onion orgy within my kitchen.

If you have ever been invaded by an army of fruit flies, then you know how much that sucks. If you have not, then read on, good times ensue. Initially there was a fly here and a fly there and with the summer coming to an end, I just assumed some recon fruit flies were just trying to stake out a place to avoid the approaching autumn death pyre. After a few days I would walk into the kitchen, kill 10 - 15 of these little pesky bastards (which by this time did not seem odd to me) and go about my business. At some point I decided that this must not be the cleanest way to live and went on a hunt for the cause. Much to my surprise I found a nice little bag of rotting onions that served as a maternity ward for an army of fruit flies that would have made Napolean envious. So I immediately dispatched the onions to the trash bin and sterilized the kitchen as best I could.

Two days removed from the sterilization I was sitting down to dinner with one of the last remaining fruit flies and decided to make sure I had done all I could in the Fly-ocide of 2008 (as it has come to be known within my house). I looked within wikipedia (the end-all of trustworthy information) to make sure that there was nothing else I could do, and did not realize that major research is being done in the fruit fly removal studies. Some of it seemed very scientific, and some of it seemed outright evil in its "rip the wings off of a fly" maniacal stylings. I just thought I would share one such entry here:

"Make an oven trap:
Remove all available food from kitchen. Clean the dishes, place open items in ziplock bags or the fridge. Open the door of your oven and place a piece of fruit (banana or kiwi peels) in there overnight. Wake up early the next morning and quietly close the oven door. Turn on the oven to 400ºF/200ºC for about 10-15 minutes and majority of your fruit flies will be gone. Clean the oven thoroughly."

So apparently it needs to be said to clean the oven thoroughly when you are finished. I guess the author did not want to enjoy incinerated fruit fly added to the flavor of their cooking. Needless to say, it was fun and I think I actually heard the screams of a hundred or so flies as they roasted to death.

Picture Updates

So it took me a while, but I added the slide show of the bowling night over on the right hand column of the page.  Peruse at your own leisure.  

The Great Gazoo and the LA Food Show

Last night we ventured out to LA Food Show where we had a nice spread of food and drinks awaiting our arrival. The evening was fun and we had some very interesting conversations.  

On another note, I made a startling realization last night that alcohol leads to poor decision making. The one highlight of the evening can only be attributed to the consumption of alcohol. I can honestly say that I have never had a Los Angeles celebrity sighting in all of my trips to the west coast, so the appearance of a live action version of the Great Gazoo from The Flintstones has to top my list at this point.

Now I just have to figure out how to let the world know my discovery. If everyone knew what I just discovered then the world could become a much more boring place to live. Please pass this along and see if this one small blog can make a big difference. The proof is here, all of the posts from the last couple days have been a direct result of alcohol. However, I will say that things were relatively tame last night compared to the crotch grabbing and disrobing that occurred on Monday. 

Lucky Strike, Luckier than We Thought

So in hindsight, I guess we got a little luckier last night than we thought. During the morning-after "debrief" we all started remembering things that just so conveniently was caught on camera. The good news is that Trey does not kiss and tell, but that bad news is that Jeff does. Luckily I abstained from drinking last night, so my evening was a little bit more under control. However, that begs the question as to why the first picture took place in the absence of alcohol within my blood. I am blaming residual alcohol from the previous evening that got stored in my brain cells in charge of logical behavior and good decisions.

So I will upload some more serious pictures in a little bit, but in the meantime, let the imaginations wander a little bit, and wonder if anyone woke up in a gutter this morning laying next to a cockroach smoking a cigarette.

In other news, I actually made it to the gym this morning and got a workout in (my first since being in LA). I kept telling myself that I would workout in the evenings but with the activities that we have been involved in each night, it has not been very realistic.

Lucky Strike, Not So Lucky

So the company went bowling tonight and it was a stinkfest for me. We had a blast but the athletic performance I am used to did not make an appearance. The bowling alley was a trendy little bar/grille/bowling club that had a dress code. I shot a 113 and a 110 which was about the middle of the pack for our East Coast team. It was quite the little rivalry but the East coast edged out the West coast with a 118 average compared to 113 for the west. The booze were flowing, the balls were rolling, and Jereme was sliding down the lane.

Is having a good time in LA