Octopushat 2.0

I can’t get no…
Originally uploaded by OctopusHat.

…satisfaction.

5:30 on a LONG Friday at work and I decided to give the nicogel a shot.

It looks gross and it smells worse (kinda like puss and dogfood respectively.)

And the bottom line?
Inconclusive unfortunately. I’ve waited 15 minutes and can’t detect much, if any, nicotine high. But my hands are tingling a bit and there is a mild euphoric sense (though that could just be that I’m off in 10 minutes…)  I’m now going to go wash my hands.

NicoGel
Originally uploaded by OctopusHat.

During the blackout Jules and I stopped at the local 7-11 for supplies when I spied these small foil packets in a display on the counter. They advertised “cigarette satisfaction in a hand gel” and of course I had to buy a couple (I think they were around $.80 each.)

I’m not sure WHY one would want “cigarette satisfaction in a hand gel” apart from times when you can’t smoke, but the idea of drug-delivery in a topical gel was simply too cool to pass up.  And in doing some research into he product it seems to be marketed simply as a way for smokers to “beat the ban” and get their fix in public spaces, indoors, and anywhere else that you can no longer light-up.  Also, in addition to these single-use packs they also sell a 50-use pump-bottle.

The ingredients are listed as “water, extract of tobacco (40%v/v)…” and a whole host of alcohols and gums.  And the only directions are “open packet and rub contents into hands until gel is gone.”  I have yet to work up the nerve to open one of the packs and try out the gel, but when I do I’ll report back.

Power was restored to our area of Hollywood around 11pm last night.  We had just come to grips with the idea of spending another night w/o cooling fans or light and were sitting out on the balcony enjoying the mercifully cooler weather and listening to the LADWP crews work on a transformer on our street.  Suddenly there was a flicker and then the click-WHOOSH of dozens are AC units turning on simultaneously.  Hoots and applause rung out from the units in our building, but just as we started to blow-out candles everything went dark again.  But HOPE was restored!  And the workers redoubled their efforts and everything was back on in another 20 minutes.  We had some minor food spoilage and some major Popsicle meltage, but other than that everything is now back to normals.

Los Angeles Zoo Labor Day 2007
Originally uploaded by OctopusHat.

Jules and I had a very nice 3 day weekend which culminated in a visit to the LA Zoo on Monday. We knew it was going to be hot, with forecasts calling for highs between 90-100 degrees, but we’d been planning the trip for a while and decided to dress for adventure and get to the zoo early.

And while it was sweltering we managed to stay (relatively) comfortable and spend a solid 4 hours photographing animals (first shots are up on flickr now) before the heat stroke became a realistic threat. We headed home, jumped in teh pool for a quick cool-down then lounged for a couple hours with the AC and Fans on full-blast. By 6pm we decided we had to brave the lingering blast-furnace-like heat in order to get some dinner at our fav hamburger joint 25Degrees. Minutes after departing the strained powergrid took a big fat turd and a 24 square block area of Hollywood lost power. When we arrived back home to a dark building at 7:30 it was 92 both inside and outside the apartment. We didn’t get much sleep last night, and I’m both groggy and irritable now. 23 hours later, and still no power to our building.

You’ve seen that State Farm commerical where people do stupid things while driving, like eating with chopsticks and putting on pants?

It is no accident that this comercial was shot in LA.  I think that Los Angeles has to be the driving-tard capitol of the world.  Forget about cell phones.  My favorite drive distractions from recent memory was the woman eating soup (soup!)  The woman curling her eyelashes, with one of those curler things, while the car was in-motion.  And the woman applying eye-liner while using a compact-mirror.

My general rule is: if it requires tools or a utinsil then you probably shouldn’t be doing it while operating heavy machinery.

This guy yesterday takes the cake though; he was FLOSSING.  And not even while stopped in traffic but flossing his teeth at crusing speed.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

(sorry for the title, I couldn’t resist.)

Saw the final (yeah, right.) chapter of Matt Damon’s Spy Thriller trilogy last night and was pretty blown-away.  I’m a HUGE fan of the Bourne Supremacy and the third film takes all of the energy, style, and smarts of that film and cranks up the volume.  It also does away with a lot of the too-twisty-for-its-own-good plot machinations and simmers the story down a only mildly convoluted spy-out-for-revenge-while-being-chased-by-those-whom-he-wants-revenge-on story.  There is a lot I’d like to say about the fantastically kinetic camera work and the films visual style and sly narrative tricks but I’m just going to make a broad statement instead:  I think Jason Bourne is the best of the movie spies.  Yup.  Even better than 007.

Regardless of that statement’s accuracy The Bourne Ultimatum is certainly the years best action movie, exposing Live Free or Die Hard as a brain-dead popcorn flick and Transformers as a glorified Saturday Morning cartoon.

Summer is upon Southern California and with the blistering sun comes all the ballyhooed popcorn flicks.  So far, we’ve caught Die Hard With a Vengeance and last night saw Transformers.

First up is John McClain’s return to wrong-place wrong-time antics and I was pretty darn impressed.  It certainly lived-up to expectations for a film in the Die Hard series, and it was a lot of fun to watch.  The trailer gives away far too many of the “OH SHIT!” moments, but I thought the script was very well put together with a more-plausible-than-average evil hacker terrorist scheme.  Justin Long’s dry and vulnerable sarcasm was a refreshing foil to Bruce Willis’s tried and true dry and violent sarcasm and the pairing worked better than most odd-pair action hero films. It is a real shame the studio didn’t go for an R rating as getting McClain w/o inexhaustible profanity felt like getting cheated. 

I was never a huge Die Hard fan though. I think 4 was the first of the series that I’d seen in the theater.  So I didn’t have the personal investment that I did with the summers biggest spectacle; Michael Bay’s Transformers.   I racked up a lot of play-time hours w/ transformers in the 80s but even when I first heard of the film adaptation I didn’t feel the burn of heresy that so many of my peers did.  I think it was the decades of intervening thinning of the brand (Beastwars anyone?) the led to my blasé take on the “reimagining.”  I went into this summer movie season just wanting to see some big ass robots kick the shit out of each other an cause the maximum amount of collateral damage in the process, all lensed through Bay’s hyper-real and oh-so-glossy style.  And that is exactly what I got.   90 minutes into the film.  The third act was a ballet of over-the-top action tropes and firy explosions.  In one of my favorite scenes Starscream decimates a whole wing of US jets, transforming and re-transforming half a dozen times while flying through downtown LA.

 Unfortunately the protracted climactic sequence comes after a metric ton of rambling and uneven story development.  You could plainly see Bay trying hard to maximize his demographic appeal with unnecessary sub-plots and ancillary characters.  And while I won’t complain about the casting of Rachael Taylor as the hottest hacker-chick since Angelina’s turn in Hackers, I will complain about a too-loud and utterly pointless inclusion of Anthony Anderson.  Bay also throws in a wide-reaching government conspiracy, with Jon Tuturro playing a fast talking MiB.  And that I think is the core of what was bugging me with the first 2 acts: the tone.  (That and the grating Lucas-style cross-cuts.)  The tone of the film felt very similar to Sonnenfield’s Men In Black: pulpy comic book fare that is tongue-in-cheek funny.  But like a comic bombing a set at an open mic night, it just comes off as awkward and hard to watch.  I imagine the tone will play pretty darn well with the middle-school crowd, and 14-year-old-John would have been at the theater for a week-straight for matinee showings. 

The bottom line, for me anyways, is that those final 45 minutes of hot robot-on-robot action completely redeem the uneven first 2 acts.  And now that it is all set-up maybe the inevitable sequel can get right to the robots kicking ass.

The TVSquad blog just posted a story about a possible leak of the winner of FOX’s reality TV show “Hells Kitchen.”  And I had to ask my self “Does anyone CARE?”  Sometimes I think I’m the only one who still harbors an unyielding hatred for “Reality TV” programming.  I’m very tempted to drop a rant-bomb right here right now, but I’ll just ask a simple question instead.

Even if “Hells Kitchen” is your very favoritest show in the whole of the wasteland of Network television, do you REALLY care about who the winner is?  Isn’t the “enjoyment” of the show just watching the “contestants” flounder, fail, get yelled at, and (I suppose,) persevere? 

What am I missing?

Caught “Grindhouse” over the weekend, and was pretty much floored by all 3-and-a-quarter-hours of it. The film is built around the gimmick of reproducing the 70s double-features of exploitation genre films shown at cut-rate theaters. The film does a remarkably good job at capturing the feel of 70s B-movies and it was very enjoyable. While I was reading about the movie (and how it did so poorly over the weekend) I found (via wikipedia of course,) an interesting quote by Tarantino from a Rollingstone article,

“

CGI for car stunts doesn’t make any sense to me—how is that supposed to be impressive? [...] I don’t think there have been any good car chases since I started making films in ‘92—to me, the last terrific car chase was in Terminator 2. And Final Destination 2 had a magnificent car action piece. In between that, not a lot. Every time a stunt happens, there’s twelve cameras and they use every angle for Avid editing, but I don’t feel it in my stomach. It’s just action.”

Bold words from QT, and I’ve been saying that the Death-Proof case is one of the best car-chases in recent memory, and perhaps it is the best chase since ’92… What else has there been? The only ones that come to mind for me right now are: Frankenheimer’s masterful case in “Ronin,” the finale of Greengrass’s “Bourne Supremacy,” and of course the freeway sequence from “The Matrix Reloaded” (which may have been loaded w/ CG but I certainly felt that in my stomach.)

Hot-linking to this pic of me in my Pauly Shore costume from last year, wearing Phil’s ass-hat.