fine whine

So I’ve watched Jersey girl and you know, it wasn’t awful. It wasn’t horrible.

It was, in a word, conventional. Smith may have thrown in a little bit of bawdy language (but using actual terms, not euphemisms) and a slightly smarter soundtrack (if not an entirely appropriate one, as somebody somewhere criticized one of the Springsteen tracks being used to backscore a sappy montage or some sort) but otherwise it’s a fairly standard take on the inappropriate parent genre. George Carlin puts in a fairly serious performance, which is unique if not disappointing, and in fact is overshadowed by Stephen Root (from NewsRadio and Office space).

Overall it was missing something, and it wasn’t just his and Jason Mewes’s cameo as stoner duo Jay & Silent Bob. It’s missing that Kevin Smith spark that sets is just off of the mainstream. In most cases the directors slog through mainstream films to ultimately make the interesting stuff. Smith has done it backward, toiling away on interesting little pieces so that he can apparently make middle-of-the-road claptrap like Jersey girl. Not to say that Jay and Silent Bob strike back was all that good, but it wasn’t like anything else that came out that month.

But hey, everybody makes a few missteps. Peter Jackson, who can now do no wrong, once made Bad taste and had it to be considered his best work.

Once Smith dumps more of his usual crew (really, Kev, the Ben Affleck train isn’t one you want to be staying on much longer) and smartens the scripts back up, he might be back on track.

I’m angry. I received an email in my work inbox today that really annoys me, mostly because I’m annoyed that it angered me so much.

They’re ‘restricting’ our ability to change the desktop wallpaper. By ‘restrict’ they mean to say ‘remove’ since now anytime my coworkers or I minimize all windows we will be greeted with a cool blue background with the company’s logo (which is itself just two words in different weights the same font mushed together).

I already know who I work for: a company that wants to suck every drop of individuality out of its workers, apparently.

I’m not sure why this bothers me so much. One theory that I have is that this is due to the other erosion of my ‘freedom’ lately, in that certain sites are blocked including Flickr and all web-based email (POP3 access too) as well as a host of sites designated as tasteless, games-related, insecure and more. They’ve told me that I am not to be installing my familiar free applications such as Irfanview and Firefox because they are not officially approved. They’ve demanded that we purge all emails older than three months, though my inbox quota frequently fills up in under three weeks if not three days.

I want to work and restricting what I do on my computer is restricting my work. But keeping me from changing my background doesn’t really change what I can do.

That said, blocking me from the Control Panel does. That is another point on the email sent today, that the Settings portion of the Start Menu will be ‘restricted’ and by restricted again they mean ‘removed’ going so far to explain the point as to define icon (”picture”) and to show a screenshot of the butchered Start Menu.

Damnit though, why can’t I keep my personal backgrounds? Am I not to have any shred of personality or humanity on my desktop? I suppose I could compensate by color-printing my collection of desktops and littering the walls of my cubicle with them, but somehow that seems, well, wasteful and stupid.

Whereas their policy is just stupid.

I’m not in the office today, but if I were I’d likely be fooling around on the internet more than usual. You see, the company has decided to shut off access to web-based and otherwise accessible personal email accounts in the interest of security and whatnot.

This of course irks me, not because I particularly care for my email but more for the fact that I don’t like people telling me I cannot do something.

So it’s good I’m not at my desk, as I’d probably be working on breaking through the security. Which is probably why another category of blocked sites is ‘proxy avoidance information’.

If there is any good to come from this entry, then, it is this: If you email me during the day, even through my contact page, I likely won’t get to it until nightfall.

Officially, that is. I’ll be working on a workaround straightaway.

So now that I’m two co-workers down (well, somewhere between one and a half and two, or maybe three, if Michelle when pregnant counted as working for two) I’ve had something of an increase in my workload. Threefold, if not more. Without getting into any detail, I can say that it’s an awful lot of garments and emails.

Oddly enough my phone is ringing less and less, disproportionately so if not in some weird inverse of the the email increase. This may be some sort of pleasant side effect, or I may just be slicing my time into smaller bits such that the intervals between calls, being filled with more and more work, seem all the more distanced even though the calls still come at the same rate. Or not.

Naturally I am under the delusion that I can somehow handle all of this.

Perhaps I delude myself because I have nobody else to delude, as promises of help and the like seem to be hopeful suggestions, not concrete assistance.

Tomorrow and Friday I leave the office to trek across the Rust Belt, and all the time I am going to be away from my emails and garments and desk and phone.

I’ll look at my emails, unofficially, but that’s all. I’m not going to check my voicemail, and I’m going to pretend that the place is at a standstill without me.

Which, effectively, it is, since I am apparently the Final Authority on a number of little decisions, the cumulative result of which is a pair of jeans in a store.

Well, several hundreds of thousands of pairs of jeans in hundreds of stores, but the idea’s the same.

From my “Well, Duh!” Page-a-day Andrews McMeel calendar for yesterday:

In 1841, England’s greatest daredevil, Samuel Scott, performed stunt acrobatics while hanging by a rope with the noose around his neck from London’s Waterloo Bridge. One day the noose slipped. Scott strangled to death on the bridge while the audience cheered, assuming it was part of the act.

Well, that’s what the calendar says. I haven’t found any corroborating evidence (or really anything at all about this so-called ‘greatest daredevil’ other than somebody else’s diary transcribing this very same paragraph, albeit without attribution) or any evidence that doesn’t corroborate.

Ten minutes in Lexis-Nexis yielded nothing about the guy.

There’s apparently a book by Lou Harry entitled Strange Philadelphia that supposedly mentions “Samuel Scott’s Last Leap (1841)”. Is there anybody out there in Philly (or with access to the Pennsylvania libraries) that could see what this is all about? Inquiring minds must know.

Inquiring minds might also want to know why the writing on the calendar is so horrible, with bad prepositional phrases and other poor sentence structure. However, inquiring minds really just want to debunk, not proofread.

Today at lunch I fled the office for what I called ’some errands’ though what I really amounted to was ’shopping’.

I went to Target and Lowe’s, to look at digital cameras and bricks, respectively. Target had been clearing out display models over the weekend and had some rather nice deals on warranty-less and non-returnable cameras that I wasn’t willing to grab on Saturday when I was last there, and today I found all the good stuff gone. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I purchased twenty eight more bricks for our back yard. We’re trying to make it look like somebody’s done some work back there, not just put holes there (as was the result of our dandelion purge that is still ongoing). It was nice to get away from my desk, as today I didn’t feel like working very much. This is not to say that I’m not working, just that I’m not fond of doing so.

In further Honda Odyssey news, they’re still all over the place. I saw four on my drive this morning, and another six at lunchtime. There is only one in the parking lot at work, and it’s a light-grey/silver new model, probably less than half a year old.

The most striking one, however, was the bright yellow taxicab. Columbus residents can likely call 444-4444 and request cab 216, which is probably one they use for groups headed to airports and whatnot.

I realize that I could pay attention to any common vehicle and see so many and it would stand out (such as the new Mustang or the Mini when those first appeared) but this… this borders on uncanny.

Sometimes I wish I could remember my childhood better. While I recall being aware of the Transformers line of toys when I was a young boy (and having probably watched the show, and its imitator The Go-Bots), I really didn’t understand what it was about (something about a civil war on a distant planet) nor do I remember ever watching the Transformers movie.

Which is unfortunate, as I would assume only small children or really, really diehard fans of the toys and show would want to sit through it*.

I’m pretty sure I never watched it, or that I blocked the whole thing out of my mind. I would have, I think, as it really is that bad.

There are two main complaints most people level at the movie:

• Optimus Prime, the leader and (probably) most-beloved semi-truck/robot is killed less than a third of the way through. This is a bad thing, but not completely uncharacteristic of small-to-big-screen adaptations.
• The music is really, really, really bad, and it’s rather intrusive. Most of it is hair-metal synth-esque crap, but one notable exception is “Dare to be stupid” by Weird Al during a motorcycle chase/junkbot fight between our intrepid heroes and the rabble gang led by a ‘bot voiced by Eric Idle.

You can’t make this stuff up. Did I mention that Eric’s character talks in a pidgin language he dubs “teevee” comprised of slogans, catchphrases and cliches? That’s mildly annoying but probably just hilarious for the kids. Likewise the dinosaur robots that speak like stereotypical cavemen with their disregard for the niceties of grammar (”Me Grimlock! Me want munch metal!”) which also is probably uproariously quanit for the adolescent sense of humor.

Small children might also not mind the complete disregard for mass and, well, pretty much anything in the way of physics, as the ‘bots seem capable of transforming not only from robots to cars and planes and guns, but also changing in size such that Megatron, who is the same size as his cohorts, can transform into a handgun to be held comfortable by one of them. That just doesn’t work, you know?

As though I can argue small points when our subject matter is giant bipedal robots from space who transform into the vehicles of Earth.

Anyway, the movie is rather bad, but I think it could be redeemed. What it needs is a phantom editor or an outright remix, stripping out all of the 80s musical detritus and some of the more pointless song and dance routines, and then some more work.

Of course, it’s apparently being remade, so all of this doesn’t matter anyway. It was an interesting look into the way animation was done before CGI came around, but only for that fact, not how good the animation is, since it isn’t very good.

Nevertheless I’m very tempted to rip the DVD, grab some footage, and to play around with it. I’m fairly certain the drawings will translate easily enough into something I can manipulate in Flash, and if so then I can really have some fun. I’m sure there are already scads of music videos and trailers redone with this movie’s visuals over the other audio, but I can’t imagine that they’ve all worked that much on the lip synching.

Anyway, that’s assuming I manage to get dvd ripping and Flash working.

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*Well, and Robert Stack’s fan base.