Trekkies bash film

I've seen the new Star Trek movie twice now. I wasn't really enthused to see it before it came out because I wasn't really a fan of the series or movies. I then saw the movie. I liked it, but a lot of Star Trek fans that I work with didn't think it was so good. Here's a video from the Onion that reminded me of it.


Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Print media gets a lifeline....

What with the newspaper industry slashing jobs left and right, this video shows what happens when a blog hires some old-timey newspaper workers. Pretty funny.

More music...

The Doves - Kingdom of Rust

Mid-tempo melancholy rock from the UK. If there was any justice, these guys would be big in the United States, but they're not...

PG pron - Roadside Assistance

Here's part of a series of videos where they make pg-friendly adult movies. It's mostly safe for work save for a little bad language.

PG PORN: Roadside Ass-sistance | Celebrities | SPIKE.com

Music I'm liking as of now...

Silversun Pickups - Panic Switch



I once described this band as sounding like a shoegazer band that drank a bunch of red bull before hitting the studio and then cranking up the vocals. It's a sort of harder rocking dreamy-sounding rock.

Passion Pit - The Reeling



My Mom was scanning my Zune and started listening to this band. She said that she liked it. Well, Mom, here's their new song from their upcoming album. I guess you would call this synth pop with more melodies.

Audiobook - Rant by Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk is not exactly one of my favorite writers. In some ways, he is new and exciting in that he has some pretty out there ideas for a plot, characters and dialogue. His books also have the weird humor in them that I find funny, but not in a rolling-on-the-floor way, but in appreciative way. In other ways, he can be predictable in that many of the characters in his books have weird fetishes of some sort, spout endless tidbits of information on various subjects and seem to sound the same. Also, almost all of his books have a really interesting start and then die a slow death as it meanders to an unexpected conclusion. While the conclusions are usually never in the direction that I anticipated, they are disappointing in that they don't draw you in like the beginning does.

Chuck Palahniuk is best known for his book called 'Fight Club' in which the main character of the book, whose name you never hear, has insomnia and finds a way to sleep by going to various support groups for people dying of various diseases. Along the way, he meets Tyler Durden, a man almost his opposite. Whereas the narrator is unsure of himself, Tyler seems to know it all about everything. Together, they start Fight Club, an underground club where guys fight bare knuckled. As the Fight Club culture grows, so do Tyler's ambitions and the narrator is drawn into an even more underground club where corporate mayhem is the game.

I saw the movie first and it's one of my favorite movies of all time. It's very dark and slyly funny, but it's a definite guy's movie for the younger set. The book is not as good. I liked it, but liked the movie's interpretation of it a lot more.

Rant is the oral history of Rant Casey as told by friends, neighbors, co-workers, bosses and enemies. It's a series of recorded statements. I think as a text, it would be a little frustrating to read, but in audio form, it's great. Each character is voiced by a different voice actor, so it's easy to tell who the character is before they finish their name.

Rant is not easy to explain. It's the story of a boy, knicknamed 'Rant', who grows up to be the carrier of a deadly rabies plague. As a boy, he became fascinated by the rush he would get by getting bit by venomous spiders and animals. Some of these animals were rabid. Rant became immune to rabies and started a small outbreak in his small town. Then in the city, a much larger outbreak was started that almost ground society to a halt. In between this, Rant gets involved in a group of people called 'Party Crashers' whose main goal every night is to drive around in the night's costume (like a wedding party or student drivers) and crash into other 'Party Crashers' to earn points. The world also deals with virtual reality brain porting and time travel.

All in all, it's a very different audio book that worked for me. Not sure who I'd recommend it to, but if you liked Fight Club and appreciate movies like Pulp Fiction and the Big Lebowski, then this may be for you.

Listened to Duma Key by Stephen King and it seemed to take forever...

I used to listen to the Howard Stern radio show all the time. So much so that Laura would yell at me to get the headphones off and 'engage' as she put it. I don't know why, but listening to every second of that show made me feel better and made the time pass when I was doing house work a lot faster.

So I started to listen to audio books starting with the Harry Potter series. I listened to both the US and British versions of the books more than once. I've also branched into other books, mostly on the humorous side.

But I also started listening to books from Stephen King. Back when I was in high school and wasn't working every single day, I had time to read his books. Now I have little time to sit down and read, let alone write. So I've started listening to books that I've wanted to read of his because of the lack of time.

One of them is one of his most recent books called Duma Key. Duma Key centers around a guy named Edgar Freemantle, who after getting injured in a horrific accident in which he loses an arm and suffers major damage to every part of his body after a crane backs over his truck on a job site, loses his wife to divorce and most of his friends. He leaves his hometown to get away from it all and ends up at Duma Key in Florida.

Once there, he takes up drawing and then painting. He also starts to rehab himself by walking up and down the beach. He finally meets up with a man named, Wireman, who is damaged like himself from an accident in his life. He and Edgar bond. Wireman is taking care of an old lady named Elizabeth, whose father owned most of Duma Key.

It's right around here where Duma Key starts to go from interesting to tedious. Because we're dealing with the narration of characters that are an old southern lady and a hispanic man, it really slows the book down. The whole audio book is over 22 hours long and boy does it feel like it. Wireman constantly calls Edgar "Muchacho" and "Amigo", which really got on my nerves. I mean Wireman was a great character and I grew to like him, but every time he used those two works, I wanted to scream.

Also, the narration of Elizabeth is done rather slow in that southern drawl, but only slower. I got tired of the slow pace 6 hours in and edited the file so it was 10 percent faster, which brought the total time of the book to under 20 hours.

After that, the book literally flew by!

What was irritating about the book, even with the speeded up voices, was the tone and pacing. For the first 3/4th of the book, the plot is a little weird, but not weird enough. Edgar paints like a genius, but it's not overly creepy. The book needed more strange stuff happening to him. By the time weird stuff does start to happen to him, I think most impatient people might have given up. I almost did!

The first half just felt like the Shawshank Redemption in the Florida Keys, but the second half suddenly ramps up with the undead, ghosts, giant frogs, a bouncing lawn jockey, murderous paintings, possessed people, blood, vomit, salt and sand.

It was a decent listen, though. I guess I'd recommend it if you like Stephen King and have the patience.