Shuffling Along

I am not a gadget-loving kind of guy generally. I only got a cell phone three years ago, I don't have a Blackberry, I think Blue-Tooths look stupid, etc. However, I love my iPod. I think it's practically a miracle that I can carry around my entire music collection in my pocket. I mean, it's barely bigger than a deck of cards.

Anyway, one function of the iPod is the "shuffle." It randomly selects and plays from the 1803 songs I've uploaded. It's a nice little feature when I'm mowing the lawn or just wanting to hear something I haven't consciously chosen to listen to in a while. What's funny about it is how it will play this great song one minute and play something lame and uninteresting next. You never know what you're going to get.

Well, my old friend Jeremy P. posted a meme on his Facebook page encouraging friends to set their iPods to shuffle and record the first fifteen songs that come up. No skipping or cheating. Jeremy does a radio show in Portland that focuses entirely on new and independent music so I had never even heard of a single one of his fifteen songs/artists. Looking at his songs and the playlists my friend Tracy posts on her blog and having listened to at least one mix CD by the Admiral, I know that, by comparison, I'm incredibly mainstream and pop oriented. My musical tastes are not avant garde or even that interesting. After years of worrying about not being cool enough, I am not fine with my top 40 tastes.

And so, with that little personal affirmation out of the way, here are the first fifteen songs and artists to come out of my iPod on shuffle.

Human by the Killers
Rush (NYC Club Version) by Big Audio Dynamite
Morning (Love Sonnet xxvii) Pablo Neruda, read by Sting
Cry Freedom by Dave Matthews Band
Here's to the Meantime by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals
Bad Boy by the Backbeat Band
Down in Mary's Land by Mary Chapin Carpenter
I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself by Nicky Holland
Always On My Mind by Michael Buble
Cryin' Shame by Lyle Lovett
Finlandia by Indigo Girls
I'm On My Way by Rich Price
Diggin' a Path by Rebecca Scott
The Meddler by The High Strung
Just a Touch by R.E.M.
The Tears of a Clown by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles

It's not too bad, I don't think. Some Motown, some country, some folk, some alt rock, some Sting readin' some Chilean poetry. Maybe I'm more eclectic than I think. (Probably not.)

233. WTH?

More than anything, I was surprised that I'd lost a pound and a half when I weighed myself this morning. Yesterday I had a double cheeseburger and fries for dinner - not the most slimming meal, you know? Plus, I haven't really done anything physical since Saturday. (Instead of using our riding mower, I used our push-mower to take care of the incline on our side yard. It's kinda steep and it's not really safe or easy to mow it with the rider. By using the push-mower, I work up a sweat and I keep myself from having a rider tip over on me and chop me to bits. It's a win-win.)

Even though I was surprised this morning, I don't really place much value on fluctuations of a couple of pounds. I've weighed myself enough to know that the number on the scale depends on everything from the time of day to what I ate for lunch. Earlier this week, I was up to 238.5 and now I'm down five pounds without really doing anything. I'm not going to get real excited one way or the other until I'm closer to leaving the 230 range.

Incidentally, my brother Dave called and said he wants to lose a few pounds too. So we've entered into a pact that we will both lose ten pounds by the end of September. Now not only am I accountable to the Internet masses (or at least the six invited readers on this blog), but now Dave is too. Hee hee. It's time to thin out, bro.

Sunday

It's a lazy Sunday afternoon here. Suzanne and Maryn are reading and Avery is napping. Suzanne asked if Avery was really sleeping or if she was faking. Maryn authoritatively answered: "Avery would never fake being asleep with her mouth half open."

Suze came to an hour of church today for the first time in a month. She left after Sacrament meeting but came home feeling hot, claustrophobic, and a little nauseated. It was warm in the meetinghouse and someone sitting near us was wearing enough perfume to raise the national alert level to orange because of possible chemical attack.

Ever since last week when we got the good news that her cervix had thickened back up, Suze has been up more, doing more, but we're both thinking now that she needs to go back to taking it really, really easy. We're still two weeks away from her not being required to be Lifeflighted to Peoria if she goes into labor. Even then, that only puts her at 34 weeks and we'd much prefer it if she'd make it to at least 36 weeks.

(I will never be entirely comfortable talking about my wife's cervix to other people.)



I watched The Lady Eve by Preston Sturgess the other day. It was funny and charming but Henry Fonda was not really cut out as a comedic leading man. I get that his character was supposed to be stiff and naive but he didn't have the charm that would have justified Barbara Stanwyck's character falling in love with him.

After I watch Sullivan's Travels and On the Beach (which are sitting on top of the DVD player as we speak, quietly wondering why they've had to sit there all week), I'll watch 42nd Street, Top Hat, Pinky, Leave Her to Heaven, and Quo Vadis. Then I will have officially watched more than my fair share of classical Hollywood films and I can turn my Netflix queue to things like The Incredible Hulk and Brothers and Sisters on DVD.

A member of our ward mixed us up some sloppy joes for dinner so I guess I'll go heat that up.

Time Traveling Dinosaurs Attacked By Killer Locusts

The Admiral and I used to play a game called "Good Movie, Bad Movie." We'd go to Horkleys, the local video stop in Rexburg before Hollywood Video, and one of us would be in charge of picking out a good, quality film that we'd enjoy watching and one of us would be in charge of picking out the stinkiest, stanky, stank-bomb of a movie that we'd enjoy making fun of. It was good times. Sometimes the so-called "good" movie turned out to be lame, sometimes the "bad" movie wasn't bad enough to make fun of and, instead, was just mediocre. But most times we took great joy in holding our own personal Mystery Science Theater 3000 session and seeing which of us could be more witty. (I have to confess - usually, it was me.)

Some part of me still finds perverse joy in the concept of the bad movie - the film so bad, it's hilarious just to think about. I was thinking about this last night as I was flipping through the guide on the Dish and saw that, for the 497th time this month, Patrick Swayze's Roadhouse was playing on CMT. The movie itself is bad, real bad, but the description in the guide raised it (or lowered it, I guess) to a new level of laughable lameness. It was something like, "Hired to clean up a Missouri bar, a PhD bouncer woos the local doctor and tames the whole town." PhD bouncer? Woo? Tames the whole town? You can't tell me that description doesn't smack of awful goodness.



The SciFi Network (or SyFy as it has now been inexplicably rebranded) has these themed weekend suckathons - six movies in a row about dinosaurs running amok, six movies about killer insects, six movies about time travel, six movies about time traveling dinosaurs facing off with killer insects, etc. The movies, when I'm allowed to tune into them, are always bad. They star Lorenzo Lamas or Casper Van Dien. They're all filmed in the producer's backyard. They all look like the special effects were produced by the AV club at the local high school. Bad. But the descriptions make them hilarious: "Backpacking college students accidentally awaken a rock monster which ravages the countryside" or "A team of mercenaries is unprepared when attacked by a swarm of irradiated locusts." Awesome, right?

Anyway, it got me to thinking about some of the poorer films I've ever seen. There's all kinds of bad - something expensive and well produced that's morally bankrupt and spiritually empty (not to mention boring) like Kiera Knightley's The Duchess. There's mid-grade, B-list, just-trying-to-be-like-everybody-else date schlock like Can't Hardly Wait, Sweet Home Alabama, Love Actually, etc. And then there's C-grade, under-funded, how-did-this-ever-get-made garbage on film. From this particular category, I choose A Sound of Thunder.

Even though it stars Ed Burns, a respectable B-list actor, and Ben Kingsley (he was Ghandi for crying out loud), this movie was one of the worst things ever put on film. it's a loose adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story. The idea is that, in the future, tourists can travel back in time. However, the rule is they can't change anything in the past. Naturally, someone does - one guy steps off the suspended path and smashes a butterfly 65 million years ago. Because of that one, small change, the future alters dramatically and everything goes to hell. It's a cool idea and, in Bradbury's story, it's left open and ominous enough that the reader can fill in the blanks with his imagination. The film version looks terrible, makes no sense, features Ghandi in some kind of white-shock fright wig, and, most importantly, has a climax that involves gorillas crossed with dinosaurs. Yep, you read that right, gorilla-saurs. Bad.



According to IMDB, the movie cost 53 million to make (where that money went, I have no idea - maybe Ben Kingsley required his trailer to be made out of solid gold or something) but only made 8 million worldwide. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film got an overall rating of 8%. That's out of a 100, in case you're wondering.

So it's the kind of movie that would be perfect to watch with the Admiral or my brothers because it's so bad, it's good to make fun of. Sadly, I watched it alone. Anyway, I'm curious - what's the worst movie you've ever seen? It doesn't have to be fun-bad. It can be just bad-bad - but I'd love to know what movie you saw that you would even recommend to an enemy.

I Want to Lose Ten Pounds

Is that so wrong?

I'm just sort of curious as to whether or not I could do it. I've never consciously tried to lose weight. For most of my life, I haven't needed to. But I've been hovering in the 230s for the last couple of years and it's just sort of bugging me. I'd rather be in the low 220s rather than the mid-to-high 230s, you know?

So, could I do it without really trying that much? I wonder if I ate bigger breakfasts, more reasonable dinners, didn't periodically pig out on half cartons of ice cream or 10 Oreos at a time, and got my heart rate up once a day, could I lose ten pounds?

Hmm. It's something to think about. The only real obstacles in my path are my utter lack of self-discipline where food is concerned and a long history of being able to eat what, when, and however much I want. Still, if I'm not utterly depriving myself but rather just not utterly indulging myself, should it be that hard? Maybe that's a stupid question.

I'm not going to post pictures of myself with no shirt on or anything like that so don't worry. I'm not going to go all Mrs. Furious on you and foist my pasty whiteness on the unsuspecting Internet masses. But I will tell you that I weighed myself this morning first thing and I was 235 lbs.

The only thing I'm not sure of is some kind of time frame. People with personal trainers and nothing to do but get their flabby butts kicked all day by Gillian Michaels on The Biggest Loser can drop ten pounds in seven days. I have a life and no trainer and no one to break my wrist if I reach for the pan of brownies so I think I should give myself more time. Don't know how much.

I will mention my progress (or lack thereof) once week, just to keep myself honest. But believe me, this ain't gonna be no gettin'-skinny blog. I've got more important things to talk about. Like comics. And movies. And silly things my daughters say. And earwigs. Lots more important.

P.S. The Body Mass Index thingee is a bunch of crap. According to it, I'd have to be 185 pounds to be considered "normal." As it is, I fall into the "obese" category, narrowly missing out on the less offensive but still not great "overweight" category. 185 pounds? That's less than I weighed when I got married - and I looked like a bunch of rags caught on a broomstick when I got married.