Archive for June, 2010

Under Review: The People Vs. George Lucas

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Song: ABBA – Fernando

Yesterday, Richard took me to go see some movie called The People Vs. George Lucas. It was playing in Maryland, at a theater called The AFI Silver – an old, but very atmospheric place it turns out. Richard had bought two tickets thinking he could find someone to go, but apparently everyone was busy. I was the only one who said I might be able to go, and when he texted me to double check, I said, what-the-hey, I’ll give it a shot. It’s free!

In case you live under a rock, George Lucas is the creator of Star Wars and director of 4 of the 6 Star Wars films. He is one of those legends who is both beloved for what he created and hated for how he “ruined” it. The movie follows this path of love to hate with many interviews with fans, people in the business and George Lucas himself. It looked to be a good time.

Of course, Richard showed up late and we had to drop someone off at a metro, so by the time we got to the theater we were already a half hour late. Upon entering, we found a reserved table that was empty, so we sat down and watched the second half. I think we missed the part about how everyone who was interviewed grew up on the first 3 Star Wars films (Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return Of The Jedi) and adore them. We came in on the part where the opinion starts to sour.

I found it hilarious and really fun to watch. The fans were rabid and didn’t hold anything back. You could tell they were so passionate about this. There were a couple of scenes from fan-made videos which were also funny, and of course, some fans were dressed up as their favorite character. But I felt the film did a good job in showing both sides. It interviewed people in the business who worked on the recent films, who pointed out that it’s all George Lucas’ property; he can do whatever he wants with it. It’s a good point, and I guess I agree with that.

After the film was over the director and a George Lucas biographer sat up front and were discussing many points related to the movie and Star Wars in general. I think they were going to take questions from the audience, but Richard and I were hungry so we beat a hasty retreat.

I recommend anyone who enjoys nerdy stuff, and especially Star Wars fans, to check this film out. Or if you are just curious about how crazy some of these fans are, it’s worth a watch!

Updates:

Removed The Essential Calvin And Hobbes, Hollywood Gays, and The Authoritative Calvin And Hobbes from and added The Indespensable Calvin And Hobbes to What I’m Reading
Added Rusted Hero link to Quick Links
Changed 7/3 – Possible Show to June & July – recording demos on the Elementary section of the sidebar

Posted in Opinion / Rant | 1 Comment »

  1. Arwen said @ June 28th, 2010 ...

    You went to Silverdocs! That’s the documentary film festival my friend Arin was helping coordinate.

Old friends

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Song: Justin Timberlake – FutureSex/LoveSound (Live)

Back in the summer of 1987 my family and I traveled by boat to Santa Catalina Island which is just off the coast of California. At the time, we were living in Long Beach, so it wasn’t such a long trip. I don’t remember anything about that trip except that we went into a bookstore and somehow Stan and I found ourselves in the humor section. My guess is because our grandparents had just gotten us an autographed (by creator Mort Walker) Beetle Bailey (mine) and Hi and Lois (Stan’s) collection each and we really loved them.

Stan picked up a Garfield book and I, for some reason, grabbed a collection from some unknown, new comic strip called Calvin And Hobbes. I probably looked inside and laughed at a few panels, and I know I really liked the cover in how it was a kid and his best friend/stuffed animal outside having fun, and the image ran over onto the back.

Well, I fell in love with it, and it is still my favorite comic strip ever (even though it stopped being published in 1995 and I don’t really read comic strips.) I was around Calvin’s age (we were both six, although he never aged), he was a super-creative kid with an imagination that didn’t stop, although it constantly got him in trouble. He wasn’t the goody-two-shoes, but he did have a sweet side. He was also amazingly intelligent. I felt a lot of similarities (although I wasn’t as smart but also not as wild.) Creator Bill Watterson was super-funny and quickly developed into an expressive and very talented artist.

Anyways, Stan fell in love with it too, so much that he ripped both the front and back cover off of my original book. So it became his copy and I eventually got another one (that again, lost it’s cover from overreading.) We continued to follow the comic strip, but not in the newspaper, collecting the next books as they came out.

We eventually fell out of it and didn’t get the last few books. But I do remember being at my grandparents when I heard the last Calvin And Hobbes was going to be run in 1995. I remember reading it in their living room and it felt weird. It wasn’t funny, more of a sweet ending, but I didn’t feel as connected to it as I previously had as I had lost touch. Well now, with the help of the local library, I’m going to read every Calvin And Hobbes from start to finish! Here’s a little run-down of all the books.

Calvin And Hobbes – the original. Collects comic strips from November 18, 1985 (the very first one) to August 17, 1986
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Something Under The Bed Is Drooling – I went back as soon as I could and bought this one. I can’t remember if I liked this better than the first, but I know that Watterson’s craft was noticeably better in it. Collects comic strips from August 18, 1986 to May 22, 1987

Yukon Ho! – I think Watterson really hit his stride starting with this one. I think this is the only other book that Stan and I bought our own copies of. Collects comic strips from May 24, 1987 to February 21, 1988

Weirdos From Another Planet! - I think this is the first one that Stan bought a copy of but I didn’t. Collects comic strips from February 22, 1988 to December 4, 1988

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Revenge Of The Baby-Sat – This was the last Calvin And Hobbes book I bought. Collects comic strips from December 5, 1988 to September 10, 1989

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Scientific Progress Goes “Boink” – Stan bought this one. Collects comic strips from September 11, 1989 to July 7, 1990

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Attack Of The Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons – Again, Stan bought this. This was the last Calvin And Hobbes book I read. Collects comic strips from July 8, 1990 to April 10, 1991

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The Days Are Just Packed – Stan bought this and/or the next one. I didn’t read it though. Collects comic strips from April 11, 1991 to November 1, 1992
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Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat – Never read it. Collects comic strips from November 2, 1992 to August 29, 1993
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There’s Treasure Everywhere – Never read it. Collects comic strips from August 30, 1993 to April 8, 1995
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It A Magical World – I Never read the book, but I read the last comic strip. Overlaps with the last book for the first few comics. Collects comic strips from March 20, 1995 to December 31, 1995 (the last one)
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The Essential Calvin And Hobbes, The Authoritative Calvin And Hobbes, and The Indispensable Calvin And Hobbes collect together and condense the first 6 books into 3. They add color to the Sunday comic strips that originally appeared as black and white in the original books.

Updates:

Removed Grow Up! from and added The Essential Calvin And Hobbes to What I’m Reading

Posted in Random | 4 Comments »

  1. Nate said @ June 21st, 2010 ...

    I can’t believe how many of these I have; I’ve got everything from Something Under the Bed… to Homicidal Psycho.

    So good.

  2. Arwen said @ June 21st, 2010 ...

    Oddly enough… same.

  3. vazenchick said @ June 21st, 2010 ...

    Growing up Peanuts, Garfield, and Calvin & Hobbes were my reading material. Although I always wondered why my stuffed animals and pets weren’t as cool as Snoopy, Garfield, and Hobbes.

  4. Stanus said @ June 21st, 2010 ...

    Some corrections:

    1. In your description it sounds as if I tore the front and back off of your first collection. Just to clarify these fell off because Steve and I were really young, rough and continuously read it. However, I obviously was super jealous of your purchase of it over my crappy Garfield nonsense.

    2. You owned the only copy of Weirdos from Another Planet.

    3. We both had copies of Revenge of the Baby-Sat.

    4. I have Days are Just Packed and Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat. Picked them up randomly on a long flight and both are good.

    5. You forgot the 10th Anniversary collection with DVD commentary-like revelations from Watterson.

Tales of a two-faced amp

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

Song: Elementary – Far Behind This Game (Live)

So you’re standing on stage with your band. You’re strumming your guitar, singing along into the microphone, when you notice your guitar is all of a sudden waaay too quiet. What the? You switch off distortion and all of a sudden you have NO guitar sound! Uh oh, this is not good. And this is what happened to me 4 songs into Elementary’s show on Friday.

I’m still not sure what happened. Although I think it had something to do with the venue’s electrical set up. Nate’s vocal mic stopped working somewhere near the beginning, and my vocals were pretty distorted. The stage was a little box of a room we had to set up in that faced the bar/crowd, and the amps were on the opposite side as those playing the amp, but facing inwards. We’d set it up this way because the band before us, DeVille, mentioned that while playing right NEXT to their own amps, they could only hear the amps on the other side pointed at them.

Anyways, after the song finished, I went to my amp and fiddled as quickly as I could with it to get SOME kind of sound. I checked and none of the knobs had been messed with and I couldn’t see any water/beer that had accidentally spilled on it. I wasn’t really sure what to do, so I cranked the master volume up, the gain and volume on the distortion channel up, and the volume on the clean up. When I went to check it on the pedal, there was hardly any sound when it was clean, and when it was distorted there was a good enough volume, but it was clean! AAAAHHH! So we dumped the two songs that require the most distortion and I played the rest of the show with a clean tone. Luckily the rest of the band was able to rally behind me and I think we might have pulled it off! Richard came out to the show (luckily he took the only photos as Brandon, our usual photographer, wasn’t there) and said it was the best he’s seen yet.

When I got home, I plugged in the amp and guitar (and turned down the master volume just in case) and was greeted with a perfectly working amp. I’m really not sure how it could fail and then magically repair itself, so because of all the other electrical problems I can only assume it was because of the venue. Oh well…

We’ve got a possible show lined up for the 3rd of July at some festival, but it’s not been ironed out yet. I’ll post something up on the sidebar when/if it becomes finalized. But our next big thing is to record an album – yup, that’s right. An Elementary album is coming (hopefully) soon! We’ve got a producer and studio lined up. The next is to set the dates and pick the tunes. As always, the best way to stay informed is keep up with the official website.

Updates:

Removed 6/4 The Red And The Black and 6/18 Asylum shows from and added possible 7/3 show to the Elementary sidebar section
Added Abba: The Albums to Current Interests
Removed Revolution In The Head from and added Hollywood Gays to What I’m Reading

Posted in Music | No Comments »

X BBQ

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Song: Journey – Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)

This past weekend was a long one because of Memorial Day. And what Memorial Day weekend isn’t complete without the annual Xanthopoulos’ Memorial BBQ!?!? But this BBQ was unlike the ones in the past. This one included …children! DUN DUN DUNNNNNN!!!!

I left a little later than expected (Elise wasn’t able to make it because of studying for tests), but was only about an hour late. Traffic wasn’t horrible once you passed Woodbridge, for some reason. Greg was running around making sure all the food was prepared, and Allison was definitely showing a baby bump, being 30 weeks along. The Dohmaster, Toine, was there as well as Lauren and John and their son, Jack, who I met for the first time. Jack is a BIG boy at 4 months, and although I’ve heard he cries alot, he seemed to do pretty well this day. Allison’s brother Dan showed up, and some of Greg’s friends where there too. There were 3 kids between the ages of 1 and 3 playing in a pool that was set up out back. I remarked to Anthony, “this BBQ is a lot different from the last one.”

The big event for me, though, was when Tim and Amanda showed up with baby daughter, Isabelle. She is super-cute and was very well behaved. I am not good at picking up features from babies, and saying “oh it looks like you”, but it was pretty obvious that she has many facial features similar to Tim’s. I even got to hold her, although I was a little nervous, having basically zero baby experience. But she was pretty much zonked from the car ride, so it wasn’t hard work.

Other than the babies, we did the normal BBQ thing. Ate hot-dogs and hamburgers, drank beer, played Cornhole, sat around and talked. I played 3 games of Cornhole, and while I was perhaps the 3rd best player at the game, I never won. Now I don’t want to come out and say it was because of my teammates, but … IT WAS BECAUSE OF MY TEAMMATES! ARGH!!

It was a fun time, but it was super-hot outside. I found myself travelling back inside for the cool air-conditioning (and also to snag some more bbq-flavored potato chips!) The WII was set up and the game playing was, funnily enough, Super Mario Kart! Toine and I both decided to give it a go, for old time’s sake (we used to play this ALL THE TIME years ago) and it came back to me pretty quickly. Allison’s parents dropped by for about 5 minutes and it was cool seeing them again. They don’t look as if they’ve changed at all. Meanwhile their daughter is pregnant! Weird how life keeps going.

I hope to make it to the next Xanthopoulos’ BBQ. I wonder who will be bringing the next baby???!?!?

Updates:

Removed My Booky Wook from and added Revolution In The Head: The Beatles’ Records And The Sixties to What I’m Reading
Added new photos to the 2010 Photo section
Added to the list of cameras in the Photo section
Removed Bones: Season 1 from Current Interests

Posted in Big Event, Friends | 1 Comment »

  1. allison said @ July 22nd, 2010 ...

    not sure why i’m just reading this post. .. but none the less..
    Obviously OUR baby Silas will be the next to attend the grand Memorial Day event .. and I hope he will be just as well behaved as most of the other kids are / were! We can’t wait for him to meet everyone!!