( Today’s blog entry title is a reference to this awesome Fishbone song. )

There’s been sun outside today, but not a lot inside, as I have spent yet another day mostly asleep. I can’t get back on track with treating my sleep apnea soon enough.

I can’t even really imagine what a fully rested me is like, to be honest. I have been tired all the time for as long as I can remember.

Might just try being obnoxiously perky for a while, just to see what it’s like.

Oh, here’s a fun cat video for us feline aficionados.

Shows what you can do with a video camera, your computer’s microphone, a cat, a dog, and some editing software. And lots of imagination and fun.

The guy has done tons of these, presumably because being cat based, cute, and mildly funny, they are perfect YouTube fodder and get loads of hits.

Cats, of course, are the only thing as popular as porn on the Internet. And YouTube doesn’t allow porn^[1], so guess what?

Cats rule YouTube. And from there, the Internet! Mua ha ha!

Why is it so easy to imagine our cats as supervillains? (And so impossible to imagine out dogs as them?)

It’s nice and quiet in the ol’ apartmente tonight. Saturday is the evening that my roomies Joe and Julian (otherwise know as J&J, the Two J’s, J², or The Happy Couple) go to Joe’s parents’ place for a pleasant evening of supper and board games.

Right now, I imagine they are breaking in the tenth-anniversary edition of Carcassone that Joe bought his Dad for his birthday. Still haven’t tried that game, which given that it has been around for ten years, evidently, does make me feel more than a little late to the part. After all, everyone who tries it seems to get instantly hooked and want to play it again and again because it’s super fun.

It’s like the crack cocaine of board games. And here I am, still puffing on the ditch weed of solo video games.

Oh well, I am sure someone had made an online version I could play all my by lonesome self if I really wanted to experience it.

That, and Settlers of Catan. Chris Catan.

What else… oh, a rare non-embed video link from me, but the content justifies it : a super young looking Siskel and Ebert, in 1980, talk about the great performances the Oscars forgot from the 1970s.

I am completely in love with how cheesy that old opening to the show is. Shot on film, appropriately enough, and wow, what is with that crazy popcorn machine that whirls the popcorn out in big spirals? Never seen one like that before. Must be damn loud.

That’s certainly not the opening I remember, but I probably never even saw the show till I was a teenager at least, and in 1980 I was only seven years old.

So in regards to the performances, most of them, sadly, are from people I don’t know and movies I haven’t seen. So they were more educational than entertaining to me, if you catch my drift.

But I have certainly seen A Clockwork Orange, and I total agree with them on why the Oscars ignored Malcolm’s simply spectacular performance. In a movie so absolutely packed with vibrant and unstoppable imagery and dialogue, like a prismacolored nightmare projected directly onto your cerebrum, even an amazing performance like his is overshadowed by the sheer vivid madness of Kubrick’s movie.

Speaking of vivid, watched What Dreams May Come recently. Amazing art direction, and some good performances (Robin Williams is always great and Annabella Sciorra looks amazing and does a great job) but overall, the movie left me feeling very bleh about it.

It’s one of these movies that is all about the visuals. The movie has amazing art direction, and does marvelous things with not just color but colorfulness itself, that make it a feast for the eyes in every frame. It shimmers with life in that “realer than reality” way that dreams and visions can have, and by the end, you really do feel like you have been walking through other people’s dreams.

But not interesting people. Because, as hard as this movie tries for big, deep, broad, meaningful commentary about love and loss and hope, the story ultimate feels entirely secondary to the visual design, as though they just needed a deep-seeming plot to connect big visual set pieces. And as a writer and a very narrative biased person, I just can’t accept that there is any substitute for story. Certainly not pretty visuals.

So a seemingly rich feast turned out to be more empty calories. No matter how pretty the icing, you still need a cake there somewhere.

Guess that’s all for now. Later, kidderlings. 🙂