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Saturday, February 6th, 2010

Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer plays cards

The running family gag from childhood, based on when I ran round the corner at the bottom of hill after church and passed the cutest girls in school piling into an '80s station wagon: Patrick says, "Hey, girls!" and promptly wipes out in the most ridiculous fashion possible. Feet go out from under, topsy turvy, Patrick tumbles across the Murphys' lawn. Did this happen in real life? No, but it was the dream, and it never got less funny. I supposedly got more coordinated after this. Apparently false.

Apparently, my apparent lack of coordination has been lying in wait for years, waiting to team up with left-handedness and my troubles with numbers. So, if you're a cute girl, I'm going to walk fine through the ice and snow, so I can continue to knock glasses through the air, all over you, run into half my exes at once and be the worst cards player ever.

Really? Really? I can't even estimate the odds! And yet, there we are.

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

The film that people forgot over time

The People That Time Forgot (1977) is the worst movie I've seen since The Chicken Chronicles, which unfortunately I saw only two weeks ago. But now I've seen the The Land That Time Forgot sequel end to end.

At one end, explorers (and a kicky newspaper girl pal) fly over polar icecaps in a biplane and lose radio contact in a pterodactyl attack. At the other end, after battling dinosaurs, giant lizards and English-trained cavemen natives, they escape an angry volcano. "We the audience know that the travellers are going to be meeting giant rubber dinosaurs but these rubber puppets aren't used to their real potential," one IMDB user says. Somewhere in the middle, you can see an enemy arrow bounce off a supporting star's forehead.

And Dana Gillespie.

We can start with Blogcritics. "Soon after reaching the island, they meet up with a cavewoman named Ajor (Dana Gillespie in the most revealing cavewoman suit of all time)…. The only reason to watch this one is for Gillespie and her costume."

I can't disagree. After the explorers crash-land and meet the dinos, there's little reason to go on until we meet Ajor. "Righteous cave girl babe with big fake B-Movie boobies and a Bowie Knife," B-Movie Central says. "She even speaks English kinda. What more could you possibly ask for?"

A better review description, that's what. SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review doesn't do much better. "There's also the bewitchingly lovely Dana Gillespie, who makes a jaw-dropping appearance as a primitive girl, even if the film promptly provides her with nothing else to do throughout other than show off her undeniably impressive cleavage."

It's possible Gillespie leaves reviewers short of words. Yes, the curves are there. But, watching the movie, that's not your first thought. As she comes sprinting through the island treeline to escape a pair of Tyrannosaurus rexes, the viewer reaction's a simple one. Who is she? And what in the world is she doing here?

Only Filmcritic nails it. "Dana Gillespie's cave girl is probably the hottest woman ever to exist without the aid of shampoo or toothpaste."

True. While you may not share luck of running into the movie on TV, you too can watch the movie, courtesy Hulu. But do take a minute to meet Gillespie beyond the cave. After finding fame in Britain as a folk singer and playing Mary Magdalene in the first run of Jesus Christ Superstar, she's now deep in the blues (with heavy jazz and Indian influences). You're not getting Robert Johnson, but she has pipes.

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

Running interference

I spent far too many hours on a router. Changing settings, reading forums, e-mailing with tech support, calling tech support at the router's maker, calling tech support at the computer's maker, but deciding to go to bed before getting through with the latter. Ten minutes of hold music late at night make you sleepy. I'd never lost to a router before (Cooper 10 or so, only a couple my own; routers 0) and wasn't going to lose this one. In the end, I didn't. I'd forgotten to plug in the network adapter's antenna, something I'd stared at when I first got the new machine last month and had no idea what it was. Unfrozen caveman Cooper.

The answer there, after a week, came by accident, little hungover and looking for slow-moving quiet projects on a weekend morning, deciding to find a way to run cable wires from one room to another that had no direct holes in between them and nothing in the rental agreement that allowed holes. But it turns out sliding glass doors only use part of their tracking and leave a little track underneath. The instructions for the cable on the new computer stumbled across the network adapter ones, and two problems were solved.

The car window's another story. Stuck a fifth of the way down in the Friday rain was a little worse than the slow moving all week. A day or so of trying got it all the way up. I'm going to perfect the garage scan drive-by, I think. Glide to just in front of the scanners, open the door and reach. Not sure what's up with the window. Could be the motor, but I have this sneaking feeling it's not. There's some film on the window, possibly the motor breaking down, but maybe salt or sand or something from the roads as the weather goes back and forth and back and forth. We'll find out soon. Honda wants us in for a new timing belt. I've put that off long enough. But I'm good at putting things off. Except for work, which always has to get done right now.

Stupid Quarterlife. It's an awful show, so the Bravo marathon today has taught us all, a show that makes you wonder how we even get outselves to work at all, operating mechanical monsters and municipal transit. But there's a sense of realism in the exposure, an artificial counterforce to the wealth of the artificial that hide us. Listing to the expanded Joshua Tree release now … the outtakes are always darker and more disorienting, if you're any good.

My hair's probably the longest it's been in years, and I'd take a picture for you on my new cell, but I'm still straddling the line. For those of you keeping score at home, that's old computer August 1998-February 2008 and old cell August 2003-March 2008. The new cell had its own problems. A long round of tech support on a mid-week evening to get it activated had no luck. Until the call ended and I shut off the old phone. The new one started up right away.

Thursday, November 6th, 2003

Musical fish or chicken?

That Adam Green is one shaggy dog. But his song currently circulating on MTV2 is so weird that he could be an actual dog and the video wouldn't be any weirder.

Jessica would be a great '60s ballad about a girl if the year wasn't 2003 and the girl wasn't Jessica Simpson. The love song seems to be loosely based on Mrs. Lachey's adventures in TV land, but its psychedelic directness leaves no room as to what Green's been watching: "Jessica Simpson / Where has your love gone / It's not in your music, no / You need a vacation / To wake up the cavemen / And take them to Mexico."

The song even has a string section. They show up in the video with Green and his band, all looking wake serious as Green slowly … crosses a stage … and plays ping-pong with a Jessica Simpson lookalike.

I don't much about him, except that at 22 he's been releasing albums for a while and can apparently find two minutes to drop in on pop culture. I like how the video's got me wondering right now, but I'm not sure how much it'll be on my mind tomorrow or the following days. How much thought can you give to someone who thinks so little herself?

Friday, October 24th, 2003

I win

$3.5 million in a Netherlands lottery, according to the e-mail. My lucky numbers were apparently 13-15-22-37-39-43. I'm sure glad I didn't play my birth date — it's not any of those numbers!

My favorite line in the spam: "Due to the mix up of some numbers and names, we ask that you keep this award strictly from public notice until your claim has been processed and your money remitted to your account."

Just as interesting is the rise in the Nigerian spam's use of cnn.com. Two e-mails in the past week, including one from former Liberian President Charles Taylor, have cited CNN URLs as proof of legitimacy. I haven't seen that concept applied before.

Finally, among the best subject lines received in the last week, we find:

"“"Fw: Flinstones ebfaqca" for generic Viagra, obviously trying to make a Captain Caveman kind of connection;

"“"ANYTHING Y0U WANT!! Y0U G0T IT" for a porn site, making me think Roy Orbison and whatever ad that song is now; and

"“"chilfish cofe" for a sweepstakes newsletter, making me think Chillfish Coffee would be a great name for band.