bitterisataste . . . words and ramblings . . . v.6.0

Monday, April 21, 2008

this entry brought to you by lcd soundsytem, "i'm losing my edge"

THE GOOD

Deliver Us From Evil Someone at work made a Priest molesting a kid joke, and a girl I know, a Catholic, got flustered and scoffed, saying that the Catholic Church isn't the only religion with a problem of sexual molestation, and implied that the problem wasn't nearly as bad as the media had made it out to be. Deliver Us From Evil, a documentary about exactly this subject, shows that in reality, the problem is astronomically bigger than the media has ever hinted at-- and considering molester priest jokes are about as common nowadays as nonprogrammable VCR jokes were a few decades ago, the problem is titanic. The movie presents us a priest named Father Oliver O'Grady, who is currently a free man, working amongst children in Ireland, who was once practicing in central California, and it follows a string of horrific incidents from city to city. It goes into detail about how the church knew exactly what O'Grady was doing and what kind of person he was, and instead of cutting this man loose or presenting him to the authorities, they would simply move him from one city to the next, in each place with unrestrained access to children, the parents always oblivious. The movie is gut-wrenching, as it gets very personal with several of the victims, now fully grown adults, who suffer from sever psychological issues from their assaults as children, but the most devastating accounts come from the parents of one girl, who can't believe they trusted this man and let him enter their house. The movie has many moments where you will-- must-- cry in sympathy, in disbelief, in horror, but in one scene the girl's father breaks down on camera, and in the movie's most raw, open sore of a moment, he swears that there is no God, because if there was, he would never let this happen to little girls. Fortunately, Deliver Us From Evil isn't all gloom against the church; in fact, the movie heavily features one Father Thomas Doyle, an ordained priest who preaches outside the church's mainstream, who is heavily against many of the church's practices, and speaks out against forcing priests to remain unmarried, and gives convincing arguments linking this with the centuries-- yes literally, centuries-- of child abuse. It's an incredibly moving film, and effortlessly so; it also delves into the bigger picture, and towards the end of the movie begins to reveal torrents of hard numbers over how many cases there really are, and the efforts the church has gone through to cover them up. You don't even need to be a Catholic to be shocked and ashamed as to the church's vast little secret. For anyone who has any interest in any serious subject, this is a must-see.

Winona Ryder If you haven't read yesterday's satirical Winona Ryder entry, go back and read it now. When my wife first read it she laughed, then turned to me and said, "Hey, I like Winona Ryder," as if in defense. Here's the thing: SO DO I!! I'd been at work when she popped into my mind, and I thought, where the hell is Winona Ryder? Isn't it time for her to matter again? When I went to do the entry I wanted to find a modern picture of her, and the first thing I found was a picture from the movie Sex and Death 101, from 2007-- and holy fucking shit, she looks hot. A whole flood of Winona Ryder-loving emotions came rushing back to me. See, although I never masturbated to her picture like the waiter in the entry, I used to have the hugest crush on Winona Ryder, specifically because of the movie Beetlejuice (and have learned that basically every kid at the time that didn't fit in fell in love with her too). Do you ever see a movie where a person in the movie fell instantly and head over heels in love with a female character, when you yourself had no idea what the big deal was? Well, that wasn't the case in Beetlejuice. If I were a ghost with monstrous powers and I were to meet Lydia Dietz, I'd probably throw her dad down a flight of stairs and attempt to force her to marry me as well. And that picture from Sex and Death 101 proved that my infatuation with Ryder was for naught. But it also cemented my point: Have you ever heard of Sex and Death 101? Of course you haven't. It was a critical flop, and wasn't actually shown anywhere you'd see it. Winona Ryder needs to stop being a has-been and start being the girl on the wall of every high school aged boy's room!!

The Nine Inch Nails/ Radiohead rivalry First, Radiohead announces two weeks before its released that their album will be offered free on the web with no DRM, and you can pay whatever you want for it if you'd like, but they offered it at a 160/kbps rate, which irritated many sound nerds (including several of my friends, although I didn't think it was a big deal). Then NIN offered Ghosts, a two hour, 36 track instrumental set the day it was announced, exclusive off the website for five bucks, and offered it DRM free, at a 320kbps bitrate, and also under the creative commons license, which means that you can do whatever the fuck you want with the music. Then Nine Inch Nails offered the tracks for remix on their website, remix.nin.com. Then Radiohead offered the song "Nude" for remix. Then NIN started a project where users can make and upload user-made videos for the songs, and will be judged by NIN with no monetary reward, but just for fun. Then Radiohead came up with the exact same deal, only this time they'd actually pay for the winner of the project. I know that, apparently, Reznor has sniped at Radiohead in the press, accusing them of bait-and-switch. Personally, I didn't really think his comments were as nasty as the web has turned them into; Reznor is a music nerd and didn't like the 160 kbps download, just like lots of other music nerds-- Reznor has also said in the past that Radiohead is one of his favorite bands and that they were one of the best concerts he'd ever been to, so I took it as smack talk from a friendly rivalry. But even if there was real venom in his statement, I absolutely love the idea of two of my favorite bands of all time pushing each other to innovate more and more, and to top one another. The only thing that can come from this is awesomeness, and everybody benefits.

The Iron Man promotional blitz Dude, Iron Man doesn't look like it's going to be as awesome as, say, The Dark Knight, or Indiana Jones, but it looks plenty damned good. It's been said that Robert Downey Jr. is as perfect a casting for Tony Stark as Christopher Reeves was for Superman, and I totally frigging agree. This better not suck. I'm serious. Not because I was an Iron Man fan, but because it would be such a waste of potential. The suit looks perfect, Downey looks perfect as Stark, this looks like it's going to be a lot of fun.

Pictures from the first half of the 20th century restored When you first look at these pictures, they are so stunningly pristine, you would at first assume they were taken nowadays on, like, a movie set that took place during the depression or WW2 era America. But then you look closely and you see all the little details, and you realize these pictures are totally authentic, but have been restored. I don't know if you get off on this kind of thing like I do, but I absolutely could not take my eyes off of them, and I literally spent minutes just poring over them.

THE BAD

My second kidney stone If you'll recall, two years ago, I got a kidney stone. It was horrific, as it was so big that it didn't move, it just sat there in my guts, causing horrific pain for an entire week. But the thing is, I didn't actually pass that kidney stone. They gave me medicine to help it move down, and what ended up happening was after seven days they scheduled a non-obtrusive surgery for me because it had been in the same spot for too long, when the day before I suddenly felt immensely better. It apparently broke up in my system and I peed it out without even knowing it. This time around, however, was a very different story. It was half the size than the one I had two years ago (which was 5.3 millimeters), and it only had that horrible, horrible pain that I had for a whole week last time for about two hours. Then it moved, which was something I wasn't expecting. By the time I got to the hospital I felt considerably better, and would get these sharp stabs in my penis about once a minute-- yes, it hurt bad, but it wasn't nearly as awful as the initial feeling of it being in my guts. The sharp stabs every minute or so eventually faded about four hours later, leaving me in general discomfort, but nothing that didn't feel like a moderate stomach ache. The doctor told me that this one was indeed small enough that I should pass it, which I was of two minds about. On the one hand I thought, there is no way it could be worse than how my first kidney stone was. That lasted a whole week, and it was the most horrible pain I'd ever been in; even on percocet, which I was basically the entire week, I could lay down and bet comfortable, but it still felt like there was a goddamn rock in my guts. So whatever it was like to pass a stone, it couldn't possibly be as bad as that was for that whole week. But on the other hand, it could be worse. How the hell do I know the extent that human pain can get to? But either way, passing it should take much less time than the entire week I held the first one. Then a funny thing happened the next morning. I got up to go pee, had a blockage, which I didn't think was unusual because for the previous few days with a stone, there was a little difficulty starting a stream. So I simply waited a moment-- no longer than three seconds-- for a stream to start, and-- ouch. Plop. Literally, that's as bad as it was. Ouch. And then there was a little brown thing in the toilet (I'd neglected to bring the strainer the doctor gave because I wasn't feeling any pain, which is what I was expecting when the actual passing came). Overall, it's a pain I wouldn't want anybody to feel, at least when it first goes from the kidney into the tube connecting to your bladder, which literally feels like there's a rock inside your guts-- because literally, there is a rock inside your guts. But if this is how normal stones pass, and it's not the horrible, horrible experience I had two years ago, then this is something that... Well. I wouldn't want to experience again. But hopefully if it does happen again-- and now that I've had two, there's a significant chance I will-- hopefully it comes out like this one, which was relatively easy.

Itunes wants me to restore my Ipod It's been quite a while since my Ipod or Itunes gave me a headache, so it's about time that it crept up again, isn't it? The computer my wife and I use is running Windows ME. Yes, I know ME is the worst operating system of all time, but we've tried multiple times to replace it with XP to no avail-- Microsoft's troubleshooting page says that if this specific file doesn't go away after a reformat, then there's no way to install XP, and of course that one file is there even after a reformat. Itunes, unfortunately, doesn't compat with ME. Fortunately, my mom's computer is right next to this computer, and it's running XP, so Itunes is installed on it, and I update my Ipod on her computer. Unfortunately, her computer crashed, meaning a reformat. I reinstalled Itunes, and suddenly it can't read my Ipod anymore, and wants me to restore it to its factory settings-- basically erasing everything. The real problem is that I have bought things off of Itunes that were on the hard drive when it got reformatted, and erasing the Ipod means it'll be gone forever-- and Itunes does not support any function where you take music off of the Ipod and put it on your hard drive. There is third party software that'll do just that, so I'm going to try that and see how it works; hopefully my paid-for stuff will be fine. But either way, I've got 74 gigs of shit on my Ipod, and while 98% of it is backed up, it takes hours and hours to put move all my songs from the CD, re-edit the tags so they fit my liking, and hours more uploading to my Ipod-- and I don't know why the fuck Itunes can't recognize it in the first place-- can't I take my Ipod and hook it up to other people's Itunes and upload music? Can't I do that with up to five computers? Then how come I can't simply reformat a hard drive and reinstall Itunes and have it work fine? Technology sucks!

Prom Night opening at number 1 It's not number one right now, that would be The Forbidden Kingdom. But when it debuted, Prom Night opened as the number one movie in America. If you remember, Grindhouse opened to number five a year ago, and that was directed by two of the most revered directors of their generation, and it wasn't a shitty remake of an already shitty horror movie from 1980, which people only saw in the first place because it starred Jamie Lee Curtis's breasts (which weren't even nude!). Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people?

Five Gum The commercial promises to "stimulate your five senses", and the commercial depicts a dude on a bed of some sort that is absolutely mind-blowingly awesome, and chewing the gum is supposed to be similar to that experience. Except that the gum just tastes like regular old sugar free gum. I suppose it's tasty sugar free gum, but it doesn't blow my mind.

Made of Honor Just when you think it's impossible for Hollywood to shit out yet another fucking awful, formulaic romantic comedy (specifically about weddings, for the love of Christ), here comes this wretched pile that has no excuse for living. McDreamy from Grey's Anatomy plays Michelle Monaghan's best friend, and when it's time for her wedding, she asks him to be her Maid of Honor! Uh-oh! That sounds like a brew of hilarity and hi-jinks! But what's this? McDreamy's secretly been in love with her the whole time? Oh shit!! Complications!! How ever will this fractured fairy tale end?
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with love from CRS @ 11:31 AM

Monday, April 21, 2008

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