Archive for ‘Blog’
644 items.
Tom Hanks laughs hysterically at a huge hole in his floor. I feel comforted. Watching the Money Pit was just what I needed. The plumber has left and I am no longer in danger of flooding my basement with raw sewage. A bright orange extension cord runs from the bedroom, across the dining room, and into the kitchen. This powers the refrigerator, which holds tasty morsels of food we cannot eat. The rest of the kitchen is without power. The might of The George Foreman Grill knocked out our breaker like it was a blind superflyweight senior citizen.
The electrician is coming later. In the meantime, we will just eat out. Again.
Our new house is cool, ‘cause – hey, it’s a house! But I think our checkbook has a hole in it.
Anyway, I watched 18 Again. It was fairly entertaining. The kid acting like George Burns reminded me of my friend Tanner Taylor, the Minneapolis piano player. To our readers in the Twin Cities, you should really check him out, he’s great.
I have discovered a new proverbial candy store: Video Warehouse. They have so many movies there that I have not seen. I plan to rent a mother load this weekend. My wife is traveling to the commonwealth of Kentucky, so I get to go on a movie binge. I’ll let you know next week how it works out.
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I thought it was odd that just as I was doing a comic about Henry Rollins that I should catch a rerun of his performance on Sessions at W 54th on Trio last night. It seems a little too obscure to be coincidence…
I must be tapped into The Force, or something…
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I just wanted to tip everyone off to the new happenings on the Bonus Materials page.
I’ve recently received some great fan art from T. S. Tennant of Counting the Cracks and Mikey McCollor of Still Untitled. They’re both really cool and you should check them out right now.
And if you have an extra minute, scroll to the bottom of the page for a couple of Guest Strips I’ve posted. One of them was for Zach over at No Pants Tuesday, but he never posted the damn thing. So now I’m beating him to the punch.
The other was for Absath< at Ctrl+Alt+Del – a recent submission for his guest week opportunity.
I had a blast making both and think they might even be funnier than what I do normally around here!
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A medicine cabinet. In the dining room. Why? Were the previous owners of my house insane?
When my wife and I took possession of the house we thought “Oh, they left that ugly mirror.” Well, as it turns out, the ugly mirror is a freaking medicine cabinet.
This weekend was very, very long. I am due to pick up my wife from the airport tonight. Hopefully she did not stray from the beaten path and become ambushed by backwoods pot farmers.
(Note to Kentuckians: I have been to your state several times. It is very nice. I am not trying to make fun of it. Please give my wife back.)
I filled the loneliness of the weekend with movies. As promised, I will quickly recount the list.
Picnic at Hanging Rock: Overall, I have enjoyed the Peter Weir films I have seen. Gallipoli is a favorite and one of the few things that can make me burst into tears. They all have one thing in common, however. They move very slooowwwly. Though it captured the essence of a 1900 Australian school for girls very well, the story lacked punch. Since it is based on a true story, all the things you want to occur to make it a nice little movie do not happen, because life doesn’t work like it does in the movies.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: I loved the book. I wish I could say the same for the movie. Watching this movie was like listening to Vogon poetry. I had to watch it in about four sittings, because this BBC produced mini-series was quite boring. The animations are good and script is obviously well written, as it draws directly from the text, but the rest is terrible. I can get past the Red Dwarf budget, but the camera shots are wholly uninteresting. The acting is forced and sometimes seems like the actors do not know their lines. I think I could have read the second book in the time it took to sleep through this one, and I know I would have been better off.
Heart of Darkness: This made for cable movie draws from the same source as Apocalypse Now. Set in Africa, ship Captain Marlow is hired to restore the link to a remote ivory trading post and find out what the deal is with the leader of the outpost, Mr. Kurtz. Tim Roth is great as Marlow and John Malkovich does well as Kurtz. The whole movie is somewhat spoiled by the fact that I’ve seen Apocalypse Now and therefore was not shocked or surprised by any of the plot points. It is worth watching though.
Roman Polanski’s Pirates: This is a well done film which has a spirit that mostly makes up for the lack of story. Walter Matthau is great as the pirate.
The Celebration (Festen) : What starts out as an odd look at a fairly un-likeable family gathering for a reunion degenerates into a deeper look at the family’s extraordinary dysfunctions. The movie is a bit boring at first but turns into a car accident from which you can not look away. Don’t watch this one with your family.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl: Very good. Fun, exciting. The special effects are very well done. It doesn’t have the “HEY WE ARE GOING TO DO SOME SPECIAL EFFECTS NOW, LOOK!” that some other films have. Johnny Depp is awesome. I wish I would have stayed in the theater after the credits, because there is an additional scene. This movie stands with Finding Nemo as the best movies I’ve seen this year.
That’s all for now. Video Warehouse is calling to my movie loving soul, so I’ll probably pick up more films soon.
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Sit up straight, kids. Cuz I’ve got big news.
Mitch Clem is in the house. Tanned, rested and ready to rock – NOTHING NICE TO SAY IS BACK!!!
It looks like Mitch will be updating whenever he damn well feels like it, which I think is a smart move. But just to see that guy back in the game puts a big smile across my face.
Visit his site now and show him the love.
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I’m looking forward to this weekend a lot. I’ll tell you why on Monday.
I am very disappointed that I did not get to see Following. I rented it, but ran out of time. I guess I’ll rent it again next week.
I did get to see two other movies though.
Neighbors: This John Belushi / Dan Aykroyd flick is pretty funny at times. Over all, it doesn’t make a ton of sense, but it’s fun to see these guys together again. It seems that this was Belushi’s last film.
Little Nicky: I had not seen this before, having heard many different opinions like “I love it blah blah” or I hate it blah blah.” I finally got around to seeing for myself what this movie really was. I like it quite a bit. It is definitely not Sandler’s best film, but it’s not Anger Management either. Though VERY strange at times, I would definitely watch this again.
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Yowza!
What a life. I spent Saturday floating down the lazy Apple River in Wisconsin. It was very cool. I was having visions of Apocalyse Now. With nine inner tubes lashed together, eight of us and a cooler drifted down the river, forced to accept what was to come. There was excitement at the beginning, when one of our tubes sank slowly into the shallows. We had to stop and reconfigure our layout, demoting that particular tube to cooler duty. Even a slow river is hard to stand up in, especially when the rocks below are round and slippery. We discovered this when some of the twine broke and split us into two groups. One group drifted near the shore while the group I was in moved on down the river until we were finally able to stop ourselves.
As we drifted in and out of different parties, I half expected Robert Duvall to come out to the water and demand that we give his surf board back.
It was a fun experience that I wouldn’t mind repeating.
Last night, I watched Road to Perdition with my sweetie. You can’t beat a good gangster film. It was very good, if not somewhat predictable.
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First up, major props to everyone for helping put Theater Hopper into the TOP 10 AT TOP WEB COMICS! There are simply no words to express my sincere appreciation for your support. I put out the call, you guys answered. You rock.
Second issue. I saw American Wedding last night. It sucked. I didn’t laugh once. Stiffler was really getting on my nerves. Every time he popped up on screen, I keep thinking “He needs to take it from a 10 to a 5.” More on this later.
Lastly, I stumbled across a link to a LiveJournal site from my referral logs called Grammar Whores (replies and comments can be found here). Although complimentary to the comic, I’m basically being called to task for the horrible grammar and spelling in these blogs. In fact, the author goes so far as to suggest you skip reading these blogs altogether.
I’m calling your attention to this for a couple of reasons:
One. I happen to really enjoy these blogs and I think they are an important component to the site. They compliment the strips, and I think they’re fun to read. I don’t want anyone skipping over them if I can help it.
Two. Having your poor grammar and spelling pointed out in a public forum is a lot like someone telling you your fly is down at a big party or broccoli in your teeth when you’re meeting the President. It’s embarassing, it shouldn’t have happened, but there it is.
So here is what I propose. If you spot any spelling or grammar errors in these blogs, PLEASE NOTIFY ME. I would rather go back and correct it than have my stupidity hanging out on the internet for all to see. I think it’s important to be proactive about this. It’s far more effective than talking behind someone’s back.
Just so everyone understands how I work, I often don’t write my blogs until after I’ve completed the strip. I’ve probably been sitting at my computer for the last two hours doing so, and anything that comes out after that is usually very hurried and off the cuff – largely because I just want to go to bed.
Again, it shouldn’t happen that way, but there you go.
Let me know where we’re at, and the site will be better for it. Thanks.
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Sometimes I get e-mails asking me for favors because people seem to think I have some sort of influence over people. But I figure it can’t hurt to try, so here we go.
It may come to a shock to some of you, but Disneyland has torn down the Country Bear Jamboree Playhouse in favor of a new attraction. One of my loyal readers asked me to pass out a link to an online petition to save the Country Bears. So here it is: http://www.petitiononline.com/savebear/petition.html
It seems odd that Disney would remove the attraction after just releasing a live-action movie based on it the year before, but there you go.
The other request I received was from Chris Cantrell asking everyone to check out Asylumantics. Chris is taking pre-orders for his very first book – “JOYGASM!” and it looks like it’s going to be really cool. You guys should be checking out Chris’ site anyway because it has great art and the writing is whip-smart.
But yeah, that’s everything. Karma points for the day secured! 🙂
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