Octopushat 2.0

Hungarian-Americans
Originally uploaded by OctopusHat.

Mate and Ilona met at Sunday School in the early 50s in Hungary. One day Mate walked Ilona half-way home, and they fell in love. Soon after Mate joined the Hungarian army and was posted on the Yugoslavian border. He used his post as a border guard to help Hungarian refugees flee from the Communist Government. The Hungarian people staged a revolution in October of 1956, but when the Russian army quashed it and killed thousands of people Mate decided it was time to flee the country as well. He asked Ilona’s parents if he could take their daughter with him and they agreed on the condition that they be married at the first opportunity. A few days later they left the village of Davod in a sleigh and crossed the border into Yugoslavia thanks to Mate’s contacts on the border. They would not return to the village of their childhood for over 20 years.

They spent months moving from camp to camp and were finally able to be married on September 10th 1957. And while their wedding was large, as it was witnessed by the thousands in the refugee camp, it was not the story-book wedding that young girls dream of. Shortly thereafter they made the voyage to New York. Their ultimate destination was California where Mate had dreamed of living since a Missionary from a church in the Bay Area had visited his village when he was a child. They arrived in Redwood City around the new year, 1958 where they stayed with other Hungarian families until they could get on their feet.

The Voros family flourished in the California sun where Mate’s entrepreneurial sprit and DIY ethos made led him to an early ‘retirement’ from the real-estate market, while Ilona, with the help of her daughter, discovered that American women had options beyond homemaker and had a successful career of nearly 20 years working at Stanford university.

Over 50 years after fleeing the Russian Army Mate and Ilona Voros finally had the story-book wedding in their church in Redwood City. They reconfirmed their vows and were joined in celebration by the very close-knit community of Hungarians in the Silicon Valley who have become their extended family.

Their story is an amazing example of the American dream-come-true, and I am very happy to have been a small part of it

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?

The question was posed on some blog, and thought I’d answer (and ask it) here.

The Scion has no real trunk, and I like to keep the hatch-area free of crap in case I fold the seats down or need it to carry stuff.  There IS a storage bin under the hatch-floor, in which I carry:  quick-detailer spray and micro-fiber cloths, the Scion manual and first aid kit, and  an umbrella.  I keep meaning to add a change of clothes to that compartment.  In the glove-box I’ve got Emergency Nuts, dried-out wipes, microfiber cloths,2 pair of trashed sunglasses, my car’s wallet, tire gauge, and a pad.  The center console holds my iPod and Sat-radio remote, a sharpie, Lego Batman, my car’s journal, a Hipster PDA, coin-sorter-thingy, mini-sharpie, mints, kleenex, and my phone-charger.  Under the passenger seat is a mini tool-kit and behind my seat my plug-in cooler.

Just the essentials.