Posts in category "Daily Life"

Characters At A League Meet

I went to the sec­ond league meet yes­ter­day, and it was def­i­nite­ly anoth­er expe­ri­ence. The diver­si­ty of all the play­ers is just amaz­ing. Their per­son­al­i­ties come out in every lit­tle detail, from their style of play, to how they lose a point, to how they serve.

There’s the team con­sist­ing most­ly of elder­ly ladies in their sweat pants, along with their lit­tle, sup­port­ive peanut gallery of friends who cheer and clap after every point. Sometimes the play­ers try to high five each oth­er when they get a good ral­ly in dou­bles, but end up shak­ing hands in a sort of awk­ward way. The most they ever say when they lose a point is, “Phooie!”, and fake an angry foot stomp, and are always the first ones to approach you for a hand shake. These are the ones who play social­ly, as some­thing to do on Sunday with their friends between what I’m guess­ing is tea and nap time.

On the oth­er end of the spec­trum, there are the play­ers who wear faces of dire aggres­sion as soon as the point starts, as if they’ll throw their pad­dles down and punch you in the face if you serve them an ace. These are the ones who intro­duce them­selves, state their provin­cial rank­ing, and imme­di­ate­ly ask for yours. They have no prob­lem with shout­ing one word exple­tives to release their frus­tra­tion when they’re los­ing, even when they’re play­ing next to the peanut gallery pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned. They don’t play for fun, they play to kick your ass.

Continue read­ing “Characters At A League Meet”…

Unsuprising Inevitable

Somehow, Aaron talked me into a doc­tors appoint­ment for a gen­er­al phys­i­cal exam­i­na­tion, some­thing I’ve been avoid­ing for years now. Turns out noth­ing is wrong, as far as the doc­tor can tell, and I opt­ed to skip the blood test. I brought up some issues I thought I might have, but he waved them off as being fair­ly nor­mal. I was­n’t too ner­vous because every­thing in my life seems to be going fine, so some bad news would­n’t have hurt (as opposed to before, where it would have been anoth­er prob­lem added to my list). I was look­ing for­ward to some bad news actu­al­ly, as if con­ve­nient­ly hav­ing it now would mean that I’d be free for anoth­er few years.

Like Toothpick Wrappers

Finally found some sweet pants, 28 28 29. They all need to be short­ened of course, one of the hid­den fees that always comes with my pants pur­chas­es and chick­en legs, but oth­er­wise they’re per­fect. I even found com­fort­able jeans that are wide enough at the foot. Orleans is a gold mine of mens cloth­ing.

A Night Facing South

Crashed at Aaron’s last night, and my god how beau­ti­ful the sky was at his place. His unblind­ed win­dows were filled with an intense gra­di­ent, and it real­ly empha­sized the stark naked­ness of the trees that were bare­ly peer­ing above the hori­zon. It was the bright­est night of the win­ter, and the room was filled with orange-pink light. I lay on his couch, wish­ing I could keep my eyes open for just anoth­er sec­ond longer before I suc­cumbed to exhaus­tion.

How A Collectors Edition Can Be Worse

So I went to HMV to buy the lat­est Dream Theater album, and I see this Scarface pack­age. Turns out that it’s the full screen anniver­sary edi­tion pack­age that includes extra doc­u­men­taries, eight lob­by cards, DefJam’s “Origins of a Hip-Hop Classic”, and oth­er assort­ed mate­r­i­al. The only prob­lem with the box set is the ENTIRE FUCKING BOXSET ITSELF.

The box says that one of the bonus­es of the anniver­sary edi­tion is that it includes the orig­i­nal 1932 Scarface that “inspired” the 1983 ver­sion. However, in an inter­view with Oliver Stone about his writ­ing of the script, he actu­al­ly states that he even though he’ll prob­a­bly lose respect as a direc­tor for say­ing such a thing, he did­n’t like the orig­i­nal.

Aside from this, there’s a DefJam doc­u­men­tary about how Scarface has influ­enced and inspired so many hip-hop artists. Yet what DePalma and Bregman were going for was a movie with an anti-crime mes­sage, made rather obvi­ous by the EVENTUAL DEATH OF SCARFACE. The mes­sage was mis­un­der­stood when the movie was first released, when they had to go to court over the rat­ing, and the mes­sage is still being mis­un­der­stood, as shown through the lyrics of rap musi­cians. After the pro­duc­ers of Scarface brought psy­chol­o­gy reports as evi­dence that the movie was­n’t glo­ri­fy­ing crime, the idiot cen­sors had to shut up and give it a sim­ple R rat­ing. And now there are tons of rap­pers using all these Scarface quotes sam­ples in their songs (Big Pun — Leatherface, DJ Clue — Cops and Robbers, etc.), TOTALLY MISSING THE POINT, and box mar­kets this as a fea­ture.

And what else comes with the box set? A mon­ey clip that’s prob­a­bly as cheap as George Costanza, with Tony’s ini­tials engraved on them. My god, how cool would some­one look if they’re at a pok­er game with their friends and they pull out a mon­ey clip that does­n’t even have their own fuck­ing ini­tials on it. I’m sure every­one would look up to some­one try­ing to imi­tate a greedy, con­fused, drug-addict­ed, friend-mur­der­ing, coke-head who even­tu­al­ly goes bat­shit insane and kills him­self. Maybe some peo­ple just iden­ti­fy with Tony Montana, a peas­ant who fails to learn any class on his way to the top and self-pro­fessed gut­ter trash.

This box set should nev­er have been released. The orig­i­nal DVD was fine. I can under­stand peo­ple try­ing to make more mon­ey out of things, but not stay­ing true to the what the direc­tor and pro­duc­ers were try­ing to do is just too sleazy.