snakes on a plane, baby

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i’ll be brief.

i had the most fun i’ve ever had in a movie theater, watching this movie just now. and that includes over a hundred viewings of the rocky horror picture show. it’s the most perfect summer movie imaginable–the tone and the script are dead on target.

it’s the quintessential example of a movie as entertainment. as such, there’s not a reason in the world why it shouldn’t get a best picture oscar nod.

i’m serious. it’s that good. go see it. get rowdy, yell at the screen, go bonkers, have a blast.

update: so much for hype. number one, but with a paltry $15 million at the box office. oh well. maybe it will have legs.

i was hoping for more, and so was our stock price.

liza, and snakes on a plane, and kiki and herb

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saw liza minnelli performing at coney island last night…incredible show.

it was a free concert, but the organizers had set up seats in the center of the field in front of the stage, and were selling them for $10 which went to charity. so for $10 i got a nice comfortable seat about twenty feet from the stage, in the center.

i did get there a bit early, to get a seat that good. by showtime, the place was a madhouse. i’m not good at estimating crowd size, but it had to be in the tens of thousands. and liza was great–very natural, unplanned, and spontaneous (for liza, anyway). she sang “cabaret” and “new york new york” at the end, of course, but preceded that with an atypical selection of interesting and well-chosen material, all of which brought the house down. standing wild cheering ovations after each song, and sometimes halfway through the songs.

and she was onstage for a good hour and a half. i think. maybe more–i didn’t have a watch.

it’s the second year she’s done this at coney island, and the last thing she said as she left the stage was “see you next year.”

i am so there. kirk stayed home and worked on the show he’s directing. his loss. he’ll be there next year. i’ll make him go.

and tonight, “snakes on a plane”, baby. i fandangoed tickets for 5:00. can’t wait to see those motherfucking snakes on that motherfucking plane. go on with your badass self, samuel l.

and sunday, a return trip for kiki and herb on broadway. we found another ticket deal.

i have a feeling we’ll probably go a third time before it’s all over. they are that good.

god, i love living in new york.

finding my voice

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this is the most disorganized schizo blog on the planet.

well, maybe that’s overstating things a bit. i’ve seen a few myspace pages, and they have more than lapped me on the track of incoherence. but most people who do this sort of thing semi-seriously have a theme, and a point of view, and they talk about things consistently and cohesively.

and they play the blog game as well. that is, they find other like blogs and comment on them, and link back to them, and then that person does the same, and everyone logrolls (the nice way to put it) or circle jerks (the non-euphemistic way to put it) themselves to lots of comments and feedback and trackbacks and such.

i just don’t do that, because, to be frank, this is more of a personal diary than a blog for you to read. if you find it interesting, more power to you. read away. but i really find this more of a way for me to be able to look back over time and see what concerned me, or what i found interesting.

when i started the blog part of queerspace.com, in october of 2004, every other blog entry i wrote was political. heat of the moment, with the election and all, i suppose.

now i could care less. or couldn’t care less. i forget which is correct. couldn’t is certainly more logical.

and i’ve been feeling a bit guilty over the past little bit, because a lot of my blog entries have been little more than collections of links that i saw online somewhere, and linked to and commented on a bit. that’s really lazy.

but it accurately reflects my level of involvement at the time, so that’s useful for me.

useful for you? maybe. maybe not.

like i said, read it if you want to. evidently at least a few dozen people do.

which puts you, i suppose, in exclusive company of a sort.

today’s silly links? reviews for kiki and herb, which were nearly uniformly positive glowing raves. ben brantley at the ny times, whose opinion probably matters the most, had the biggest rave of them all.

ny times review of kiki and herb alive on broadway (free registration required)

ny daily news review of kiki and herb alive on broadway

ny post review of kiki and herb alive on broadway

i’m definitely going back, assuming i can get tickets. these reviews, in combination with the extremely limited run, might make well-priced seats scarce.

getting caught up

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i’m back at it. camping was fantastic. i’d forgotten how much i liked it. and kirk can build a good fire, so we had all our food cooked on the open wood flame. yum, yum.

i didn’t forget to go to kiki and herb this time, and the show was, as always, phenomenal. don’t miss it. it was the last show before opening night tonight, and they were up for it. i’m going to go back again, assuming i can get a ticket deal of some kind.

the fake steve jobs blog, which i’ve written about several times, is back in operation. check it out–hysterically funny writing.

and, although kansans are once again supporting evolution in schools, it appears that the united states is ranked next to last among countries of the world in acceptance of this scientific theory. the chart depicting the results is truly depressing. only 40% of americans accept evolution as true, with 60% stating either that it is false, or that they are not sure. at least we are smarter than the turks in this regard.

the continuing adventures of the fake steve jobs

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

for whatever reason, my favorite new blog (which i’ve written about before), is down and out.

the fake steve jobs assures us that he will return, but in the meantime if you missed out on the fun, you can look at the google cache of the old site.

the fake steve says about all this:

Dudes, I had no idea this blog was getting read so widely. I’m being held in captivity during the WWDC — scary story of rendition etc., which will be my firt new post. Anyway, I will relaunch soon, not sure where yet. Will keep you friggin informed. Like, with a post here or whatever. And FYI this is NOT an Apple publicity stunt. You really don’t think they have that much sense of humor, do you?
Cheers–
Fake Steve.

of course, he gets even more publicity now, because everyone puts on their tinfoil hats and starts spouting conspiracy theories involving apple legal.

whatever. come back soon, fake steve jobs.

and on a side note, i’ll be camping in the deep dark woods for the rest of the week–ricketts glen, in pennsylvania. and will therefore not be blogging until next monday at least.

i know you are crushed.

kansans regain common sense

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opponents of evolution have lost their majority on the kansas state board of education.

well, thank god. who, no doubt, also believes in evolution, because she let it evolve after she set the big bang in motion, or whatever. so now schoolchildren in kansas will hopefully at least have a clue about what the scientific method entails.

and the subhead of this post is “but kentuckians lose theirs”. their common sense, that is.

it’s in kentucky, you know. the new creation museum. where you can see exhibits depicting dinosaurs co-existing with adam and eve, and other anachronistic anomalies.

thanks to this article and the efforts of this museum, i now know that all fossils on earth are a result of the great flood described in genesis.

who knew? screw that carbon dating stuff, right?

art, and more art

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i’m seeing the wedding singer, broadway musical version, tonight. as their homepage shouts at me, “i love the ’80s!!! so i’ll adore this show!!!!!” i’m sure.

the tickets were free. who knows. i might be surprised. kevin cahoon, my favorite hedwig, is in it, so at least i can enjoy watching him, i hope.

but, having seen a bit of it on the tonys award show, i’m not hopeful. but it’s something to do.

and, given the 100 degree heat in new york today, we thought we’d see a movie beforehand, to kill time and beat the heat. so we’re seeing clerks ii at 5:00.

now that i’m excited about. i love kevin smith. chasing amy is one of my all-time favorite movies. and jay and silent bob are the best.

snoochie boochies! i can hardly wait.

more quick takes

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fidel castro just might be on his last legs. too bad we have such nitwits in the executive branch of government, who if castro exits stage left will no doubt botch a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. bush, of course, is feeling fine. thanks, karma.

floyd landis, we hardly knew ye. according to the ny times, the testosterone in landis’s blood sample is not natural, but synthetic. game over? looks like it. always get natural testosterone, injected naturally. i swear by it–it works wonders for me.

mel gibson swears he is not a bigot, even though he also swears that jews are the source of all wars in the world today. is gibson a bigot? is the pope catholic? appropriate questions, those.

thanks everyone. i’ll be here all night. don’t forget to tip your waitress.

chihuly and other more natural wonders

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chihuly was amazing to see on saturday.

i’d never been to the new york botanical garden, even though it’s fifteen minutes on a bus away. so worth the trip to stop and smell the roses. literally. the rockefeller rose garden was in full bloom, and man were those roses fragrant.

and the glassy chihuly things were a spectral wonder. i liked the ones that were in context the best–they had little ones that were hiding in plain sight, blending in with the vegetal surroundings and looking like martian versions of plant life. but the big showpieces were cool as well.

and late lunch afterwards at mike’s deli on arthur avenue. we had an enormous gorgeous antipasto platter, served on a pizza peel. $20 for $50 worth of food and enjoyment–we were the envy of everyone around us, all of whom were ooohing and aaahing. stupidly, i didn’t take a cell phone picture.

i guess i’ll have to go back. just for you, i will. the sacrifices i make.

so i’ve been jamie howard of floral city. of citrus high school.

i was jim howard of flagler college. of st. augustine. of nease high school. of einstein’s. of gainesville. of vanguard high school. of herff jones. of deerfield beach.

this weekend made me remember how glad i am to be jamie howard of new york city.

chihuly tomorrow

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

off to see chihuly tomorrow.

what, you may ask, is a chihuly? you may not be asking, because you may be more cultured than i am. but, before i got free tickets to the chihuly exhibit at the new york botanical garden through work, i had never heard of him.

shows you what i know. don’t listen to me, that’s my advice.

but now the dude is everywhere–all over new york there’s outdoor advertising, tv programs, newspaper articles, you name it. the guy must have an amazing press agent.

he, apparently, sculpts in glass. well, actually, he probably sculpts in a studio. he sculpts using glass as his medium. better?

so tomorrow i shall be off to view glassy things amongst the blooming plants. i’ll try to remember to let you know how it went.

and on a completely unrelated subject, i think i have a new epitaph for myself.

don’t you have your epitaph written yet? you’d better get on it.

anyway, my old epitaph was “sit on my grave and picnic”, inspired by picnicking on jim morrison’s grave in pere la chaise cemetery in paris when i was younger, until the gendarmes chased me away. my new epitaph?

“he knew his place. and he never went there.”

it popped in my head yesterday, and it hasn’t left yet, unlike most things. i didn’t think it applied to me, but kirk says it does, so there you are.

say it ain’t so, floyd

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are you telling me that i can’t even trust a mennonite now?

apparently floyd landis, the tour de france winner, has flunked a drug test administered after stage 17.

i saw his mother interviewed on tv. she was a charming mennonite woman, full of stories about his childhood in pennsylvania dutch country, and was so proud of him.

i hope for her sake this is a false positive test. she deserves better than having barry freaking bonds for a son.

update: the ap story was updated to include a quote from his mother:

Arlene Landis, his mother, said Thursday that she wouldn’t blame her son if he was taking medication to treat the pain in his injured hip, but “if it’s something worse than that, then he doesn’t deserve to win.” “I didn’t talk to him since that hit the fan, but I’m keeping things even keel until I know what the facts are,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Farmersville, Pa. “I know that this is a temptation to every rider but I’m not going to jump to conclusions … It disappoints me.”

now there’s a classy woman.

hey, floyd. call your mother. she deserves a call.

update #2: he called his mom. from the updated article:

Efforts to reach Landis were not immediately successful. But Arlene Landis said her son called Thursday from Europe and told her he had not done anything wrong.”He said, ‘There’s no way,'” she said in an interview with The Associated Press at her home in Farmersville, Pa. “I really believe him. I don’t think he did anything wrong.”

from what i’ve read, this may be a tempest in a teapot, caused by his approved use of cortisone for his degenerating hip.

i sure hope so.

fork in philly

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kirk and i ate at fork (306 market street) in philadelphia on our recent long weekend getaway. it came recommended highly by philadelphia magazine in their “best 50 restaurants” issue, and a few egullet people liked it as well, so we said what the heck, and tried it.

not too happy.

for a restaurant that purports to be destination dining, there’s a lot wrong here. i’ll try to stick to criticism of my own meal, since i only had bites of kirk’s food, but i think he was even less happy than i was.

i started with ceviche. ceviche is supposed to be raw fish marinated in a citrus-based liquid that “cooks” it. what i got was pretty much sashimi in sauce. it wasn’t marinated long enough to have the flavor of the marinade penetrate. and one of the items was a raw oyster, which i’m pretty sure isn’t ceviche. to top it off, it was served slightly warmer than room temperature, which is not how i want my ceviche. at least room temperature, please. did it sit under the heat lamp? warm raw fish. ugh.

my main course was ahi tuna with vegetables. the vegetables (potato, fresh sliced heirloom tomato, slightly cooked fennel, and probably more i can’t remember) were nice in a very light and flavorful sauce, and the ahi was top-grade. the menu description mentioned cayenne, but boy did i get the cayenne. the ahi tuna was rolled in it, it got everywhere, and totally obliterated the subtlety of the rest of the dish. once i cut the outside of the tuna off, things got better, but i ended up with a little pile of uneaten tuna, which i should not have had.

dessert for me was a cheese platter. there was a nice selection of various cheeses–i like starting with mild, soft cheese and moving toward more pungent and aromatic cheeses, which is how it should be done. there was nothing great on the mild end, but i ended up choosing robiola bosina (a creamy soft cow’s cheese) for the mild end, a blu de moncensio (mildly salty cow’s blue) for the next one, and époisses for the last cheese. époisses is a very very pungent cheese–so pungent that it ruins your taste buds for anything that comes after it. but it is wonderful, in all its barnyard-tasting glory.

but you aren’t eating anything after that, at least not anything that you want to know what it tastes like.

and accompanying my cheese course was a card, listing all the cheeses and noting the ones i selected. a nice touch, if a bit expected at this level of dining. customarily, your choices are checked off, or numbered in the order in which they should be eaten. and the cheese should be arranged in order on the plate as well, from mild to pungent. my cheese was out of order.

someone moved my cheese.

and, worse, they numbered it époisses #1, robiola bosina #2, blu de moncensio #3. wow. i barely know what i’m doing on this level of dining, and i’m the first to admit i’m not a supertaster. but i know not to eat my époisses first.

and, to top it off, we had wonderful service until the waiter inexplicably stopped waiting on us just after the desserts were served. some giggly manager type came over and told us that she’d be our server from then on, except that she had to give tours of the space to some clients, but if we needed anything we should just yell.

ok then. it would have been nice if the waiter had come over himself and told us this, rather than just abruptly disappearing. and the weirdest thing was, he prepped our check and then was just hanging around the place–we saw him around for the next half-hour.

espresso at the end…giggly manager/waiter chick told us it was “on the house”, but i know that she was just too damn lazy to redo the check.

i know this all sounds a bit pretentious, and whiny. but kirk and i are not demanding diners–we’ve both spent too much time working in restaurants to be annoying when eating in one. having worked in restaurants, we have reasonable but exacting expectations, based on the level of restaurant we are in. although we don’t dine out at that level very often, we do occasionally, and we know what should happen, and what kind of food and service we should get.

and we didn’t get it, although we did get a big $200 restaurant check added to the amex, minus two cups of espresso. it’s just disappointing that, for one of the few times we splurge like this, things went so horribly wrong.

my advice to fork?

—trust your ingredients. all the ingredients were top-notch quality. don’t feel like you have to drown them in more and more spices and geegaws and thingys. i’ll let kirk tell you about the fleur-de-sel on the chocolate cake in the comments, by way of further explanation.

—train your waiters. i was the world’s worst waiter, and even i knew that you didn’t leave until your last table left the restaurant. the unannounced departure of the waiter was inexcusable, even if we had been a difficult table, which we weren’t.

—sweat the details. on this level, you present the cheese correctly. the waiter stays. the crumbs get swept. the ceviche isn’t really warm. i don’t ask for anything–you anticipate it. i don’t get told to “yell if i need anything”.

loved philly. hated this restaurant.

wonderful weekend

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back to work today, although the weekend was, as the title says, wonderful. there’s a lot of residual happiness carryover, so it’s been a good day at work. children were the theme of the weekend, to some extent.

not that we had children. or took some with us. or found some there, and brought them home. but our interactions with them.

the first day was at six flags great adventure, in new jersey. as you’d expect, the park was full of kids. and even more than usual probably, because it was inner city camp day or something. there were hundreds of kids running around in matching “camp fill-in-the-blank” t-shirts.

and they were uniformly well-behaved, polite and a joy to be around.

you’d think they’d be going ape-shit, with little to no adult supervision and a park full of mischief to get into. and they had fun, don’t get me wrong. but they said “excuse me” and “please” and “thank you”. and when there was a group that wanted to ride a ride together, they’d ask people if they wanted to go past them in line. and when you let one or two go ahead of you so they could catch up to their group, they’d smile and thank you politely.

don’t tell me kids can’t be well behaved in public anymore. these kids were far better without their parents around than i ever was with my mom right beside me. someone’s doing something right there.

someone’s doing something wrong in mount laurel, new jersey though. after our six flags visit was cut short due to inclement weather (a definite theme for the weekend, unfortunately…), we checked into our hotel and drove to a nearby movie theater (the amc marlton 8) to catch a friday evening showing of “the lady in the water”, which was the best pick of the lot.

theater full of kids, all probably dropped off by their parents in lieu of paying a babysitter. and the kids were a terror. running up and down the aisles, screaming and yelling, talking on their cell phones and to their friends in adjoining seats and aisles. wouldn’t come close to being quiet, even after being shusshed politely and after loudly being told to shut up (that was me. i’m not shy about that sort of thing).

i know i sound like an old fart here, but it’s a public place and i expect, after having paid ten dollars, to be able to concentrate on the movie. i guess i’m spoiled by movie theaters in new york and by going to more expensive imax theaters, where people in general make only appropriate noise.

honestly, i’ve read all about the horror of going to movie theaters these days, and how people just have stopped going and use netflix instead, and i’ve never really experienced it.

now i have.

and the theater staff was useless. some kid not any older than the noisy ones stood there in the front of the theater listening, said nothing to anyone, and left. of course he’s not going to say anything to anyone. he’s a kid, and these are his friends. there needs to be an adult sent in, for adult supervision.

we left, and they did refund my money, though. i’ll give them that. but if i lived in that town, i’d never bother going back. i’m sure there were some kids in there that wanted to listen to the movie, too. i feel sorry for them.

don’t tell me that “they were just being kids”.

so were the kids at six flags.

magical mystery trip

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we’re not taking a big vacation this year. just two small ones. and the first one starts today. in about an hour, actually.

we’re going to philly for a long weekend. actually there’s an intermediate stop along the way, today, and then philly for saturday night.

we have phillies tickets on saturday afternoon, and then a nice dinner in a restaurant i found through a bit of judicious research.

if i’m being vague about the details, it’s because the details are a surprise to kirk, so they’ll be a surprise to you as well. when i tell you about them. if i remember to tell you about them. not that it’s such a big deal, anything i have planned. but any kind of surprise is better than no surprise at all. and later in august, kirk has his surprise weekend planned for me. i know it involves camping, which will be cool, and hiking, which i’ve actually been itching to do a little of.

anyway, it’s off to avis to pick up the car, and then onward and upward. more to come later, maybe monday, but not before then.

sometimes two small things are better than one big thing.

the blog i wish i wrote

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and the blog i wish i’d thought of.

it’s a fake (i’m assuming it’s fake, anyway) blog written by someone who purports to be steve jobs of apple, called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, Aged 51 1/2.

subtitled: “Dude, I invented the friggin iPod, okay? Have you heard of it?”

whoever writes this thing is a genius. it’s laugh-out-loud funny, especially if you know a bit about apple and its history. even if you don’t, it’s still hysterical. and the author has the point-of-view down completely and consistently.

best comedy writing i’ve read in ages. but maybe i’m biased.

quick followups

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earlier i wrote about a guy who thought an onion article on abortion was real, and wrote a scathing blog about it.

he’s interviewed on salon. it’s a great read.

also, i wrote a couple of days ago about the idiocy of the government’s terrorist target list. turns out that, as a further example of the nuttiness, times square is not on the government’s list of targets. read that in this week’s time magazine.

amazing.

now i’m just waiting for someone to pick up on the india/pakistan story. i have a feeling that, although this is being ignored by the media, it might still pop up to haunt us.

i hope i don’t have to follow up on that one.

world war iii?

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i may just be an alarmist. or a fatalist. or a pessimist. or whatever ist you prefer.

but this article about india and pakistan has me thinking.

the article quotes sources in india as saying that pakistani intelligence is responsible for the recent bombings in mumbai that killed over 200 people.

great. just what the world needs. another region of the world destabilized based on probable conflict between islam and non-islam, which is what this comes down to. there’s suddenly an awful lot of this type of thing going on in a lot of different places all at the same time.

was pakistan involved? is india setting up pakistan as a straw man? does it matter? it matters not. what matters is the perception on both sides, and trust me, if this accusation gains a foothold there’s going to be major friction involving islam in yet another area of the world.

to add to the current issues in iraq.

and israel.

and iran.

and any of a host of other areas of the world. throw north korea into the mix as an unrelated wild card, and i’m now suddenly more nervous about an unstable world than i have been in quite a while, and that’s really saying something.

and, to put it mildly, i’m less than confident in our current government’s ability to navigate the tricky waters that may be ahead.

and, to put it bluntly, i’m less than convinced that our government is not the wizard behind the curtain, pulling levers.

i may just be paranoid. it’s hard to tell anymore.

what’s your brazilname?

~ jamie ~ 3 Comments

if you played football (soccer for the u.s. crowd) for brazil, what would your name be?

the brazilian football name generator will tell you.

mine is “howeiro”.

this is much easier than figuring out your drag name, which involves remembering your first pet’s name and the street you grew up on, facts that anyone interested in their drag name has long ago repressed.

with this, you just type in your name, which hopefully you remember and can spell, and voila. or, for the illiterates populating the internets, viola. oh how that “viola” business irritates me.

anyway, generate away.