Collateral Bloggage

I can’t really set this one up adequately, other than to say John Williams needs to get a restraining order against this guy, like now.

I must admit, this took a lot of skill to pull off.

Before we discovered Napolean Dynamite, we had a standard movie we’d watch whenever we’d watched something depressing and/or frightening.  That movie was UHF.  Yes, the Weird Al movie.  It’s probably the stupidest movie ever made, which is saying something when one considers the career of Ben Stiller.

But it’s clean and funny.  And completely random.  As an example, I give you…

Sorry…thought I’d scheduled this one.  Oh well, the youtube expired and I had to grab a new link anyway.

Ever wonder what happened to Obi-Wan between Episode III and A New Hope?  Well, even a Jedi Master’s got to pay the bills. Add a bit of film noir, and you’ve got something I’m guaranteed to enjoy and pass on.

Hat tip: Jedi Master Derlla Nasoj

I’m fairly certain my alarm went off at 6:30 this morning.  I, however, went on sleeping.  I guess I thought it was Sunday.  Didn’t get in to work until about 10am.  Nice.

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I spend a good deal of time reading.  When I commented some time ago about the fact that I average about a book per week (my currently reading and recently finished lists are somewhere over on the right side of this page), someone asked me, “How much time do you spend reading every day?”  I had no reply.  Reading is such a part of my day that I generally don’t pay much attention to how much I do it.  So I’ve started taking note.  Last Wednesday, I decided to pay attention.  The breakdown was this:

Before work:

• 15 minutes in Jeremiah (5 chapters)
• 10 minutes in The Origin and History of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment (finished a chapter)

At work:

• 20 minutes in The Elements of Style (at a Blood drive - more on that later - while a needle hung out of my arm - and on the walk to it and back - yes, I read while walking)
• 10 minutes in The Elements of Style (while eating lunch - finally finished the book)

Back home:

• 10 minutes in 50 Physics Ideas You Really Need to Know (probably would’ve read more, but we stayed up late watching John Adams on DVD - more on that later)

That only adds up to 65 minutes, which seems a bit low to me.  If I hadn’t finished Style, and I’d had something more engrossing than Origin (don’t get me wrong, it’s really good in its way!), I might have read for another half-hour or so.  I figure I tend toward 90 minutes during the week, maybe 30 minutes on the weekend.  Is that a lot?

I seriously doubt I’ve gone a whole day without reading something in a very, very long time.

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Speaking of Blood Drives, have you donated lately?  Not to brag or anything, but my blood is very popular (since I’m O+, anybody with the RH factor can use mine).  They basically call me every eight weeks, and I’m in the habit of donating.  I have no great love of needles, but I have great veins and they’ve only missed mine three times in my 39 donations (Wednesday being #3).  I’m one pint away from my fifth gallon, and I’m unreasonably excited about reaching that milestone.

Seriously, it’s really not that bad, even if you’re averse to needles.  It’s a good thing to do, and they give you cookies!  Plus, how often do you consider questions like “Have you ever had Chagas’ Disease?” or “In the past eight weeks, have you donated a double unit of red blood cells on an apheresis machine?” (Yes, I have that question memorized.  It’s on my long list of “No” responses.)

I like shaming my coworkers after donating, with my nice little arm wrap and the beautiful iodine stain on my arm.  I go around telling them that I had some ill humors drained.  And they don’t even use leeches anymore!

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I love TV on DVD.  I got John Adams from the library, and it’s well worth the overdue fee I’ll be paying for it.  The performances are uniformly brilliant, and it’s just one of those shows that makes you want to read.  At least, it makes me want to read more about that period.  Since I haven’t had a U.S. History course since 10th grade (yeah…1989), it’s something I’d like to become more familiar with.  Look for my book list to include some early American history books next year.

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Ethan and I are enjoying the MLB Playoffs right now.  Ethan seems to think that since the Rays were terrible last year and yet really good this year, and since the Mariners were terrible this year…(ah, the hopes of a young lad)

I don’t want to burst his bubble.  The Mariner could be substantially better next year if the organization starts paying attention to what the USSMariner guys say.

Oh, and I can’t believe the Cubs lost.  That, my friends, is why they play the game.

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Pushing Daisies is just a complete delight.  When I first heard about the show (long before it came out), I figured it would be morbid and gothic, for some reason.  It’s more like the Wizard of Oz.  Hmm.  I was going to go with a couple more comparisons here, but none of them really work.  Because Daisies is just different.  The show totally does not work without the narrator, Jim Dale, who should get an Emmy.

The cast is awesome, and what’s not to love about characters named Ned, Chuck (female), Olive Snook, and Emerson Cod?  I have a man crush on Emerson, if for nothing else, his tirade in last week’s episode about men not being allowed to cry.  The finger wag made the whole thing.

Oh, hey, I just found out what the show is…it’s a forensic fairy-tale.  That’s perfect.  Found it on Wikipedia, and I believe it because I found it online.

My favorite line from the narrator?  Sorry, slight bad wordage: “Harold Hundin was, indeed, a damn polygamist.”  It was funny when Emerson said it; funnier when done in Jim Dale’s whimsical voiceover.

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I still have more things about which to muse.  I guess I should save them for next week since I’m now at nearly 900 words.

Maybe I’m taking the easy route here, since I linked Stephen King’s excellent and, dare I say, “Foney” take on Movie Snacks in my Monday Morning Musings. If you didn’t go check it out, here’s a sample (and another link to the full article):

From www.ew.com:

With my calorie-absorbent drink in hand, I can then safely order a large popcorn with extra butter. Of course it isn’t really butter, it’s some sort of mystery substance squeezed from the sweat glands of small animals, but I have developed such a taste for it over my years of filmgoing that the real stuff tastes wrong, somehow.

I normally get my popcorn with no glandular butter, but he makes me rethink that choice…

My son is seven.  Which is absurd, becuz I am not nearly old enough to have a seven-year-old.  Alright…maybe my knees and feet are, but the rest of me is still very young.  Except maybe my hairline.  Maybe my waistline.  Definitely not my sense of humor (where immaturity holds on for dear life).  Shoulders are on the bubble.

Nah, I don’t feel old.  Just because my son is only nine years from driving, eleven years from voting…no need to panic.

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Okay, so we’ve established I’m most definitely not old.  And I’m certainly not a 98-pound-weakling (NPW).  I could snap an NPW’s neck like a chicken’s.  I’m (nearly…or almost…or slightly more than) twice the man of a NPW.

On the other hand, I haven’t exactly been burning up the workout facilities -anywhere- in some time.

Solution?  One Hundred Pushups.  Yep, I’m training myself to be able to drop and gimme (Really?  Give myself?) 100.  How?  Well, observe:

If you don’t want to visit the link right now, I’ll break down the system for you.  First, you do a pre-assessment.  Basically, you drop and do as many reps as you can.  The number you grunt out puts you into different training intensities.  I made the mistake of being able to do too many, and I’ve found the program difficult.  I’m not saying you should slack on the pre-assessment, but I’d encourage trying to do the pushups in a very controlled manner.  That way, you can ease into the training a bit more.  Plus, it’s probably a better isometric exercise when done on the slow side.

You’ll do your exercise three days a week, and it’s broken into four levels.  For instance, you might do 20, then 15, then 13, then 13 again.  Then you do as many as you can for the fifth level.  I know, I said four levels.  You rest between sets, of course, so it takes some precious time away from reading coffee and drinking books.  Sorry…a bit punchy from my workout.  And still pumped.

I like the feeling of my flabby muscles starting to harden.  I just hope my shoulders are up to the task.

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My little sister is in Japan.  Awesome.  She’s there for a seven-month stint as an Engrish Teacher.  Okay, English Teacher.  I set her up a blog on heasley.net so she could blog about her experiences there.  That way, when she gets back and starts telling us her cool stories, we can say, “Oh, you blogged about that.”  You can’t underestimate the value of that.

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You might not think of Stephen King as a funny man, but he is.  I’m not a big fan of his work, never having actually cracked the cover of one of his books (I listened to The Gunslinger, but that’s it).  But his take on Movie Snacks is altogether hilarious.  Hat tip: Colin.

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Funny…I thought I had nothing about which to muse.

WARNING: Restroom Fixation Disorder symptoms forthcoming.

I’ve known for some time that I’m blessed with a less demanding bladder than many of my peers.  I’ve left exactly one movie for a trip to the bathroom (and it was The World is Not Enough, which didn’t require much attention) in my adult life.  I use the restroom during plane travel just to break up the monotony.  At work, I pretty much go when the restroom intersects a path I was already taking.

I generally characterize myself as having a “Five-hour bladder,” but I’ve never actually studied it.  Should I decide to, I know what I’ll call my data-collection: a Jourinal.  When I came up with that name, I actually LOLed, so I just had to blog it.

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Ethan and I went to see Star Wars: Clone Wars with our neighbors, and it was a lot of fun.  It’s not exactly The Shawshank Redemption, of course, but it was still cool to see with my son.

Really it wasn’t even a movie, but more like an extended pilot.  By that measure, it succeeded really well.  It also maintained much of the typical Star Wars feel.  You know, cool fight scenes, bad dialogue…

The really cool thing about this series (and the former one), is that animation allows the Jedi to really be shown as superhuman.  The movies did a decent job of showing glimpses of their skills and powers, but I’m excited to see what they do in an all-CG universe.

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Somehow, with my torrid reading practices, I’ve only managed to finish one book in August.  Since July, I’ve started to read eight different books.  I suppose it’s natural that I’d only finish one of them by now (I finished five others during the month of July).  The library just keeps sending me new books before I can finish the old ones.  My policy is, when I get a new book, I read the first chapter or so to see if it’s more interesting than one I’m currently reading.  It usually is.  Hence, I start reading the new one until I get a newer one.  I’ll need to double-back to catch up on some of my partial reads, and I’ll have to cut the cord on a couple of them.

The “newer” book I just finished is Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution.  I know.  I’m going to hell just for reading such a book.  But I like to keep an open mind on such things and read all around the issues.  I’ve read several Young Earth Creationist books, and a couple Old Earth Creationist books, and now I’m reading some Evolutionist books.  This wasn’t a very good one.

Actually, as a concise history of the Creation/Evolution debate, it was really good.  Very readable and well balanced.  But it failed to deliver on the promise of the title.  In the introduction to the book, the author mentioned that he’d had to reinterpret the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, and Original Sin.  He then failed to elaborate on his reinterpretations.  He never got back to it.

Basically, the book was about how wrong-headed the Creation/Evolution debate has gotten.  Granted.  But I was really hoping he’d actually discuss the theological implications of his belief in evolution.  The closest he came to it was this paragraph in his concluding chapter, titled “Pilgrim’s Progress”:

God’s creative activity must not be confined to a six-day period “in the beginning” or the occasional intervention along the evolutionary path.  God’s role in creation must be more individual - so universal that it cannot be circumscribed by the contours of individual phenomena or events.  We must resist the temptation to make God into a “superengineer” or “master craftsman” or “grand artist.”  God may indeed have all these attributes, but we ought not to suppose that any of them capture more than the tiniest intuition about God’s role in creation.  It seems to me a more hopeful perspective to step back as far as we can and examine the biggest possible picture in the hopes of getting a glimpse of what it means to say that God created the world.

Nice thoughts, but it still doesn’t really help in anything but the most broad theological terms.

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That’ll do for today.

When people think of classic movie stars, particularly in musical/dance-heavy pictures, the names you’ll typically hear are Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, and maybe Gene Kelly.  But, for my money, it doesn’t get any better than Danny Kaye.  He had the rare combination of a great singing voice, decent dancing chops, and a gift for comedy (physical and otherwise).

Maybe you know his work…maybe you don’t.  Maybe you’d be surprised to know that he was “the guy who can dance” in “White Christmas” (cuz Bing sure couldn’t).  In any case, if you’ve never seen the “Vessel with the pestle” scene from “The Court Jester”, you haven’t lived.  I’m here to make your life just that much more fulfilled (the funny stuff really starts about 1:10).

If this whet your appetite, get a copy of Jester and let it fly.  Then, you might consider “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, “Wonder Man”, and “The Kid from Brooklyn”.

By the way, I grew up on Danny Kaye.  My affection for him shouldn’t be taken as a slight on the other guys.  “Singin’ in the Rain” is still an awesome movie, and Gene Kelly is a superior dancer to Kaye.  But, Danny just had the whole package.

So, Ben Stein (of “Bueller….Bueller…?” fame) is the coolest extremely geeky man in the world. He’s got a new movie coming out about the lack of intellectual diversity in schools, as regards the teaching of Human Origins. Meaning Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design. Check out his site:

BTW, in posting a reply on Mr. Stein’s blog, I coined the term “Darwinentalists”. Feel free to use it, but please give proper attestation.

And for the football fans out there, “Darwin” + “Fundamentalist” = “Darwinentalist”.