Geek Love

I know I've mentioned this before but I am a serious GEEK.

For the most part I don't make general announcements about my proclivities. Sometimes though I feel my insane love for something start to bubble to the surface and as the words start to leave my mouth I hear myself getting more and more excited about my obsessions.

This happened the other day when someone mentioned Doctor Who.

August 23 is only 9 days AWAY!!!

They simply said they hadn't really liked the 2005 reboot.

One simple statement and I felt my insanity bubble up. I started with one comment about why they were wrong and it spiraled into a 20 minute diatribe about how Doctor Who is awesome.

I kept remembering my "favorite" thing. One after another and they were coming out in a disjointed stream of consciousnesses rant.

Now if you love Doctor Who then you can understand that trying to explain it on the best of days makes you sound crazy but when you're excited it gets worse.

In my head I could hear myself getting ramped up but I couldn't seem to stop it. My crazy was spilling out for everyone to see.


Good news though. A few weeks have passed and no one seems to be giving me the side eye so I guess a little crazy is forgiven.

Raccoons and Monkeys

Remember when we cloned a sheep? (holy cow that was 1996!)

Dolly!

It was all Brave New World references and religious freak outs. People love a good slippery slope argument. To prove how scary this was we made movie after movie where we cloned people with horrible consequences.

How the hell did this guy pull off Batman?

We even pulled out some old stories that seemed relevant again. Can you say Island of Doctor Moreau? (I'm talking about the horrible remake with Marlon Brando, based on the other movie from 1977, based on the other movie from 1932, based on the book written in 1896)

Both of these movies came out the same year as Dolly.


Now if you are a conspiracy theorist you won't believe this next part so just pretend I'm a puppet for the man and keep reading.

Nothing happened. No animal people hybrids or nightmare diseases that brought about the long awaited zombie apocalypse. Nothing other than a few other medical experiments that we promptly forgot about.


I'll admit I never really cared although that had more to do with my age than any real apathy for the subject.

I care now though.

There are two movies in theaters right now that make the idea of animal experimentation seem either awesome or terrifying.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

I didn't see this movie. Why are they wearing face paint?

Guardians of the Galaxy

I assume if I get a Rocket I get a Groot too.

Both have talking, intelligent animals that make it much harder to pretend animals don't have souls.

They are making me think hard about cloning. On the one hand if it means monkey overlords and human subjugation I'm totally against it but on the other hand if Rocket can be my new best friend I might have to start writing my Congressman.

Food for thought people.

Can You Fake an Accent?

I remember a period of time where a few of my girlfriends and I would talk with a fake British accent for hours on end. We thought we were brilliant but I can only imagine it was truly annoying to all around us.

That isn't the point though. It didn't seem that hard. I'm sure to actual English people we sounded like idiots but hey, we were young, and stupid and we probably were idiots.

I bring up this trip down memory lane because I just watched an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

He's doing that again.    Making movies.    Since we didn't change the rules and he can't run for President he's back to "acting". Yeah there are quotes around that word because although I will watch True Lies every time it is on he is not winning an Oscar for his nuanced roles anytime soon.

Back on topic though. So the movie I watched was Sabotage.

Besides Arnold's awful hair. It's a pretty good 2 hours of people never running out of ammo and surviving ridiculous amounts of bodily trauma.

The part I find funny though is that because in the movie Arnold is a DEA agent we need to explain why he has an Austrian accent. I couldn't help but remember all the other movies with him that I had watched where they had to do the same thing.

Sidebar: As I type this The Presidio with Sean Connery comes to mind and how even though he was a Lt Colonel in the Army he had a Scottish accent. No one complained though because he beat a guy up with his left thumb. Right one's too strong for you.

Arnold isn't playing King Lear so who cares? 

No one, but right now there are so many actors on American TV speaking with American accents that are not American!


This is a movie list but you get my point.

Is he lazy? Does he just not care?

Maybe it's because if you lost the accent he wouldn't be Arnold anymore and there would be no more ridiculous Internet insanity like this.

I should not have laughed at this as hard as I did. I'm blaming it on my sleepiness. 

My Son is an Inspiration

Not in the sense that he has done something that would make old ladies and moms smile with pride. Although he does do stuff like that sometimes.

Today though he was messing around on my phone and playing with all the sound clips I have downloaded on there as various alerts and ringers.

Included is of course the Rocky Theme.

Coming inside from the grocery store he kept playing it over and over and giggling. Then as we unpacked the last bag he paused the music and made this proclamation.

"I feel like I just accomplished something."

I had to agree. Theme music makes everything better.

Imagine scrubbing the casserole dish with this playing in the background? I bet you aren't even going to let it soak. You're going to think about Rocky hammering into that side of beef and before you know it the dish is going to be spotless.

What about while you are mowing the lawn? I bet that lawn will be done before you know it.

I'm going to see if this kind of psychological motivation works the next time I have something I really don't want to do like scrubbing the bathroom or folding the laundry.

I'm probably going to become immune to this song though so if you have any other suggestions let's hear them.

ORPHANS (yes this again)

TV and movies give orphans and single parented kids a very unrealistic view of death.

It used to be just soap operas that had people coming back from the dead. Or suddenly an identical cousin would show up but either way it was harder to kill a soap opera star than a vampire.

I say this because the kids and I just got back from How to Train Your Dragon 2.

This has nothing to do with this post but this part was super cute.

So if you haven't seen it I'm supposed to warn you about spoilers but based on what I just wrote and the fact that that is the first movie I mentioned you can kind of guess what happens.

So read on, all the other shows will be old enough that if you haven't seen them you can stop pretending you are going to.


Still here? Good.

As we left the theater I couldn't stop thinking about all the times this had happened off the top of my head. Alias, Castle, Grimm, 90210. I'm sure if I wanted too I could find more but I didn't. I'm being lazy plus this isn't really a post. Just a a quick ramble. So no details about how these shows brought back dead parents or why it was ridiculous.

Just a few honorable mentions though because the nerd in me can't resist.

On some shows it isn't parents it's people in general. No one is really dead.  EVER!!!

It just occurred to me that right now there are two shows on TV all about random people returning from the dead.

Thanks entertainment for messing with the permanence of death.

Binging (I checked. That's how you spell it.)

I want to add an 'e' so it doesn't look like I'm talking about BING. Cause I'm not.

This is not a post about poor eating habits either. Although I could do that.

I'm going to talk about Netflix.


It's summer so most regular TV is on a break. It's the perfect time to drown yourself in an entire TV series. I love Netflix. It is an amazing thing to be able to watch a movie whenever the hell you want.

Remember when I was a kid we had to wait until it came on TV and it would be "modified for content" or butchered for language and worse still it was cut so it  would fit on the screen. Remember I'm old and TV screens used to be a different size than movies.

It seems like this should have been fixed a lot sooner but alas we were forced to only see half the movie. Sometimes it wouldn't mater and others it would seems like the cinematography was a big fan of panning back and forth.

WOW. sorry but that was some serious rambling.

Back on topic. I love Netflix but I can't binge watch it. If I know a whole season is available I'll watch 2 or 3 episodes then I will want to cut to the end. This is especially bad if I know Netflix has the entire series.

I'm not saying I wont go back and watch the rest of the show at some point but I just want to cut to the chase.

Hmmm sexual tension between the two main characters on a show that ran for 6 seasons?

You know they aren't getting together till at least season 4 and then they will break up in season 5 and finally end up back together in season 6 to make the fans think everything ends with a happy note.

How about I just cut out all that drama and get to the good part?

Next episode? No thank you. I like to watch them out of order.

Maybe that's why I loved Firefly so much?

Hmm that's something to think about.

Something else to think about is the TIME SUCK that is pinterest I just spent 15 minutes looking for a simple poster of Firefly and instead pinned 4 movie quotes and 3 cross stitch patterns for Jayne's hat. Like I can cross stitch? 

Life is a Balancing Act

OMG she's about to get deep. Feelings might come out.


Sure you could infer that from the title but not to worry. This isn't that blog and I'm not that girl.

Perhaps you are aware of this but I have what some might refer to as a "fresh mouth". I've been called sassy, smart mouthed, sarcastic, frequently ridiculous and always flippant.

My first instinct is to make a joke and never to remain silent.

(This is so true that I once joked about my friend's father's passing less than a week later. Much to the horror of everyone else in the car.)

Each time before I open my mouth I weight the consequences. It might not seem like that but I really do. Sure sometimes I still make the wrong call and offend someone or hurt someone's feelings, but I did think about it.

Sometimes the consequences come back on me and I have to decide if I'm willing to pay them.

In high school I could pretty much mumble anything under my breath and remain untouched but then I decided to go to a military college with rules and regulations. Punishment for opening my mouth went from a stern lecture to push ups and extra work.

The good news was my arms were really strong. The bad news was that I really had to make sure opening my mouth was worth the punishment.

After that though I was on my own and the consequences pretty much went away. If you didn't like that fact that I was frequently, brutally, honest you could always choose to not be my friend.

The other night I was reminded again that there can be potentially painful consequences for calling someone out.  In Krav Maga I felt it was possible that the instructor might have been fudging his stop watch. His "10 seconds more." seemed a lot longer than they should have and not just because I was sucking wind.

Calling him out earned me and extra ten seconds of suckage but it was totally worth it.

Balancing acts require some give and take. I'll take an extra ten seconds of punishment every day if I get to speak my mind.


See how I brought that back around to the fact that today is the Fouth of July?

Freedom is an amazing thing. Make sure you are using yours wisely.

This photo is called irony. Just because you are free to do something doesn't mean you should.