“Cars 2” is not just a bad movie, it is dangerously bad. It is, by far, the worst movie Pixar has ever made, though “A Bug’s Life” may give it competition in that race. It is the most poorly written, the most poorly designed, voiced, and executed movie in Pixar’s otherwise stellar line-up. Heck, even the opening short was horrible, and those are usually the sweet cherry on the Pixar sundae.
I’m going to tell you absolutely nothing about myself that should matter to you. I am a male human. I was born with XY chromosomes, and my body parts hew to the genetic norms of a human male. I am heterosexual. My ex-wife was a female human, and I will seek out new partners who are also female humans (‘how romantic,’ I know). I prefer female humans to male humans when it comes to love and its various accoutrements. I am mostly masculine, though I do have some decidedly feminine qualities about me. In the traditional ideas of masculinity, I fit into some norms, though I also like some traditionally feminine colors and design aesthetics, I participate in many activities that are considered more feminine than masculine, and I reject certain masculine traits as unappealing.
What is a friend? Has the definition of friend changed since the dawn of the social network? Are we now friends with people whom we might have ignored years ago? There was a point when I thought of my Facebook friends list as a collection, and I tried to gather as many friends as I could. I even thought of it as a competition, trying to ‘friend’ more people than my best friend. You don’t have to tell me why that was a stupid idea, I already wrote a column saying as much. CNN recently published an article from a former Facebook employee. He has created a new social network that only allows you to have 50 friends. I pared back from about 350 people to just under 200, and I could still probably cut a few more and hardly notice, but mostly because they are inactive on Facebook, not because I don’t want to hear from them. But now I think it’s time to stop cutting. It’s time to take a step back and think about what truly makes a person a friend.
“Chris, I have bad news,” my email starts. I’m sitting in front of my computer, and my room is a mess. My face is dimpled and red. “I messed up,” I continue, “I really messed up. There might be no movie review next week.” I’m about to hit send. My head is hung in shame.
In-N-Out opened in Dallas this month. I was in Korea on business when it happened, but as soon as I returned I decided to swing by and get a burger. The restaurant opened early in the week. I showed up on Saturday to a line of cars that was probably a half mile long, at least. That was just the drive-through. The line of people outside on a gorgeous Texas spring day was more than a hundred strong. Maybe you heard about all of this. Maybe you saw the woman crying tears of joy at the opening of a new fast food restaurant. It did make national news, after all.
Early last year and late in 2009, tech fiends were debating the best product to come out in the first decade of the new millenium. My answer was decisive: TiVo. Not just the DVR in general, I mean, specifically, TiVo. I love TiVo. Tech friends, always quick to correct technical errors, would point out that TiVo actually appeared in 1999, but they did not have to tell me that. I owned one in 1999. I might have been TiVo’s best customer of all time. But this month I shut off my TiVo service and switched to something different.
When the PlayStation Network went down, I did not notice. I own a PlayStation 3, and I do play it regularly. But I never play games online. I can’t. It’s not my favorite style of gameplay, the fast-paced twitch-gaming. I’ll never practice enough to be competitive among the top gamers I seem to always encounter. But mostly, it sucks out too much of my soul and leaves me feeling intense hatred for the human race.
This past week, I did something I haven’t done in years. I bought a CD. I bought the Beastie Boys “Hot Sauce Committee Part 2.” And I bought it at Best Buy. It’s not that I’m against digital downloads. Quite the contrary. Not only am I a huge fan of digital music, but I also pay for every single track I download. I haven’t downloaded songs illegally in years, and a hard drive crash a few years ago ensured that all of the music in my collection was either ripped from CDs I own, or downloaded legally.
When I first heard about the “Thor” movie, I had the same reaction as most folks I know. “Thor? Really?! Thor?” Couldn’t we just have another Hulk movie instead? Did the “Power Man and Iron Fist” script not turn out the way they hoped? Until I was about 16, I was an avid comic collector, and I favored Marvel titles, of which “Thor” is one. When I turned 16, I started spending my comic book money on gasoline, and it all went downhill from there, but I still have boxes and boxes filled with a few thousand comics, bagged and boarded, safe in my parents’ basement. I collected “Thor,” but I also collected “Speedball,” so my taste is suspect. In any case, the news of a “Thor” movie mostly means, to me at least, that Marvel is running out of super heroes for the big screen.
First, I want to say that this is all my fault. I’m going to save commenters the trouble of pointing out that I was irresponsible, perhaps even a bit entitled, and anything I’m going to gripe about could have been solved by a rational adult who takes care of their own responsibilities. With that said, I’m going to now tell you the story of how I officially became a Texan, and how it could have been prevented.
My favorite piece of artwork of all time was at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. It’s also my favorite museum, and this piece probably cinched it. I was walking through the exhibit halls, when I happened to bump into an older woman. I said “excuse me” without making eye contact, and I kept perusing the art. Then I noticed a bench in the middle of the room. It was too far to be a seat for pondering the wall hangings, but it was clearly meant for observation. So, I sat down. I watched the crowd. It took me a few minutes to notice that the old woman was still standing there, where I had bumped into her. She was slightly hunched, perhaps in her seventies. She carried a shopping bag, and was wrapped in average clothes for a cold New York day. But the most interesting thing about her was that she was not real.
I was reading through Chris Davies’ column on giving gadget advice, and I thought I would add my perspective. I used to be a gadget reviewer. The first product I ever reviewed was the Sony D-EJ01 anniversary edition Discman. A Discman, for you young ‘uns, was a large music player that played compact discs. A compact disc? It’s like a record, um, or a DVD, err . . . it’s a single-use MP3 made out of plastic. I know it sounds silly. We were silly in the 90s.
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