Welcome Back

After much chiding of me not posting comments on Sara's blog for reasons of not remembering my password or even username for that matter, Sara went and recovered my password and username for me. So since I have access to these again I might as well use them. However I think I gotta take the two of them (If a Bear Dreams in the Forest and The Ground is Lava!!!) and combine them into one journal. No separate blogs for dreams and just random stuff. With that being said here is the dream I had last night:

I started out riding on a boat in the middle of the night out at sea. It was a luxury yacht type thing with overindulgence of luxury being the theme of how it was being put together. Time passed on the cruise ship and I bumped into a buddy from work, Mike Pelosi. Well apparently the Pelosi family had some problems with whomever owned the boat because they were all throw overboard. And then after some investigative work they figured out that I knew Mike and tossed me overboard as well. Luckily I was not far enough out to sea that I couldn't swim to shore. So I slowly swam back to the lights of the city that was on the coast.

The city certainly looked like a glitzed up glamored city ala Las Vegas but last I checked Las Vegas didn't have any coastal property. But nevertheless I swam to the coast, and found one of the hotels that I knew of and tried to check in. Mike was there too and after the staff not letting him check in due to him losing his wallet while trying to make it back to shore he just seduced his way in with a couple of ladies taking him up to their room. I however had my wallet and just checked in the normal way. My dream at this point made a point to show that the reason I still had my wallet is that my back pocket had a Velcro flap that kept it from falling out.

I then went to travel to my room. This hotel was massive with an amusement park contained in the main lobby in which a lot of the rooms looked out over. I apparently picked the wrong bank of elevators to take me to my room, since the normal elevators must have been a little further. The elevator I chose was a golden somewhat bullet shaped elevator with a glass door and a glass roof and only room for one person. I stepped in, hit my floor and then watched the elevator go down despite my room being on the fifth floor. After dropping about ten feet, the elevator stopped, and flew upwards at an alarming rate. I then shot out of a tube and was flying over the lobby/amusement park area. The door opened up I guess to give the illusion that you were going to die although it was impossible to move since the way the thing was flying you were being forced into the back wall. The door then closed and we hit a funnel where the elevator went down heads first.

After we traveled down the tunnel a bit, a voice came over a loudspeaker in the elevator, "I am sorry but there appears to be a bit of turbulence up ahead." Looking through the glass roof I see a giant swirling vortex of water. This lasted a while until I was dumped out into a flowing river. The elevator righted itself and slowly drifted off until it got to a sorting area where the elevator and any other elevator that was floating down the river was picked up and put in a tube which went to its destination floor.

After that the dream sorted petered out in terms of noteworthy and/or remember-able events.

Up? No more like really down.

How is it that an animated movie by Pixar (a Disney owned company) creates one of the most depressing movies I have seen in a long time? Well for those who have not seen the movie lots of spoilers lie ahead, but here is how you take an animated movie and make it horribly depressing.

First start off with a brief explanation of how our hero meets his wife as a young child and how they both want to travel to South America to be explorers. Next start showing a montage of your hero's life in which you grow up, get married, want to have lots of children with your wife for her only to find out that she can't have kids at all. Now montage your dream of going to South America by slowly saving up money and have it crushed time and again by random bad luck occurrences (broken leg, car repairs, etc.) If that wasn't enough lets say you finally do save up enough money in your old age to buy a plane ticket and go see Venezuela but by now your wife's physical condition isn't too good and she is on the last legs of her life. And this is all within the opening 20 minutes of the film.

Now lets just go ahead and fast forward and list through the rest of the depressing things: young boy sidekick's family is basically in shambles; he tries so hard to get one badge ala boy scouts just to see his dad; despite getting the badge he still doesn't get to see his dad; the older man's childhood hero, the reason he wanted to travel to South America in the first place, tries to kill him and the young boy sidekick.

Talking dogs and a lovable colorful ostrich type bird cannot cover up the entirity of the depressing nature of the film. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. It did not even end happily.

So what is it about childhood memories of food that make us fondly think back, man that was delicious, but while we are in the grocery store never actually pick up and buy. Is it that we do not want to taint our childhood memories with cold hard reality that this food is actually about 32% stuff you shouldn't put in your body but do anyways cause its cheap and because, hell, you are a kid you don't know the difference? These are some of the examples of foods that I remember fondly but have since gone under.

Flintstones' Push Pops
Sherbet in a tube, with a little stick to push it up to eat. I have not had this stuff in years but can clearly remember the package and how awesome the stuff was. Except for purple, it totally did not stack up to the orange flavor. This is my number one candidate for food as a child that I wish was brought back. That and the Flintstones need to expand their market share past vitamins again.

Squeeze Itz
An attempted competition entry for Kool Aid. These simple sugar water bottles employed a selling tactic of making the bottle little faces that you squeezed while you drank to push that delicious sugar water into your mouth. Lets face it, we could taste test this with sugar water and food dye but as to not dilute the awesomeness that was in our school lunches let us just fondly think of our favorite face as we gulped down everything in the bottle in under two seconds.

Surge
Now while I personally never was a drinker of Surge, this was a favorite of some of my buds back in the Middle School days. Rumors of how much caffeine was in it, and how totally hyper you would get after drinking it was enough to get most of my adolescent friends to buy it. Apparently the only way to try and taste test it would be to go to Norway, the only remaining home of Surge.




Its almost as if it is better off for these products to have gone under before we reached adulthood. The rosy glasses of childhood leave these brave lunchtime and dessert companions with just the fond memories of how good they were with a childish palette. The real question will be in 20 years will children be blogging about their lost favorites not even knowing the tasty goodness they missed, or would my favorites even stood a chance in today's cafeteria?

Here is to Old Man Jenkins

After tuning in to Adult Swim a bit earlier to watch my nightly cartoons when I stumbled across something quite silly, The Othersiders. Now to me, call me skeptical if you like, all ghost hunting shows are, in a word, retarded. Grainy cameras, complete darkness, I'm guessing cutting and pasting 8 hours worth of boredom in a rusty old ship, decrepit house, etc. to make a 30 minute show 6 of which are commercials.

Now I know the show has not yet been released but come on, teenagers investigating ghosts? I feel like we are a VW van, a talking dog, some rubber masks and a lot of pot references away from Scooby Doo. The group make up is the same even: a head guy and girl (Fred and Daphene), an asian researcher (Velma), and two dweeby looking guys (Shaggy and Scooby.) If they were old enough to shave I think the producers would make one of them grow a little facial hair to complete the ensamble. So lets all hope that at the end of every show they get to unmask the ghost that would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for their meddling.

Drunk Texting

So alcohol + anonymity + text messages + the internet = hilarity.

www.textsfromlastnight.com