tiny e: "Don't eat my worm, please!"
(hours pass)
tiny e: "Why won't you eat a worm?"
Tom: "Wait, now you want them to eat worms?"
tiny e: "Well the worms pick fights all the time!"
What's something you did when you were younger that you still haven't confessed to your parents?
Submitted by Bizz.
If Mitch Hedberg were still with us, he would point out that "when you were younger" in this question should go without saying.
What's your favorite holiday movie?
"The Empire Strikes Back"
Yes, yes -- it is too a holiday movie. It has:
- Non-denominational religious messages
- A big snowy spectacular
- Family squabbles
- A long, wacky drive to visit with friends (trip to Cloud City)
- Festivus miracles (Yoda lifting the X-Wing out of the swamp, R2D2 getting the hyperdrive working at the last second)
- Little elfin helpers making the perfect gift (I would have loved to see Jabba's face when he unwrapped his frozen Han)
What were your top 5 TV shows of 2006?
- The Wire (of course)
- Battlestar Gallactaca
- Heroes
- Lost
- The Office
Deadwood and Arrested Development probably belong on the list, but I don't remember which bits were new in 06.
Had I seen all of it, "30 Rock" may have made the list. The two episodes we've seen were delightful. But we chose the wrong SNLish number show at the beginning of the year.
Feel like I'm forgetting something.
Spilloverz: A restaurant chain with mediocre food that positions itself next door to more popular restaurants with long wait lists. Oh right, that's Ruby Tuesday's I'm thinking of.
Leftoverz: A restaurant chain that buys up entrees from other restaurants and re-serves them. Menu changes every day.
Naysayerz: This is the restaurant I suggest to Tiny E when she shoots down my other ideas every Friday night.
With a free Sunday afternoon on our hands recently, Tiny E and I decided to take in a moving picture show. We opted for the 4:35 showing of "For Your Consideration" at the AMC. A startling plot twist awaited us:
Tom: "Two for 'For Your Consideration' please."
Box office teen: "That'll be $18.50."
Tom (speedily crunching numbers in head): "Really?"
B.O.T: "Yes."
Tom: "For a matinee?"
B.O.T.: "We don't have matinee prices after 4:00 on holidays and weekends anymore."
There you have it, friends. Shoving away hundreds of years of
tradition like it isn't no thang, AMC has redefined the concept of the
matinee. My inner old man is up in arms over this.
Entertainment Weekly tells me that the movie theater industry is in big trouble because we're all staying home and watching TV shows and DVDs and especially DVDs of TV shows. If AMC wants to compete and save itself, this strikes me as exactly the wrong direction to take. In fact, movie theaters should find a way to lower their prices. A good will gesture like reduced prices would play to the theater's advantages -- the ability to force advertising on a captive audiences and make a killing on iced Coke-a-cola and popped corn.
I'm a cheap bastard at heart, and I actually like the obscenely expensive concessions revenue model. Everybody wins! When I had no money, I went treatless, smuggled treats in via Tiny E's purse, or got free treats courtesy of cronies who worked at the theater. Now that I'm a gentlemen of means, the high prices are part of the fun. I strut in and announce, Yosemite Sam style, "I'm a-splurgin'!" I don't feel like I'm being taken advantage of because it's completely voluntary.
Call it the concert effect. Which reminds me -- why not sell exclusive T-shirts and DVDs and such at exorbitant prices? The nerds will snatch them up, I'm sure.
I understand theaters have to pay studios the bulk of the box office on new releases. But they should charge only enough on tickets to break even or make a tiny profit. And then they should drop the price after the movie's been out for a while and they don't have to give everything to the studios. Think about the free great publicity that awaits the first theater chain to slash prices.
In this instance, we paid $18.50 to see a movie on its last legs at 4:35 in the afternoon. For $18.50, you can get a loaded Netflix subscription and watch just about all the movies you want. For $18.50, you can buy one good DVD or two lesser DVDs. Or you can get four movies on demand. Or one medium bag of our spoiled dog's fancy-pants food.
My biggest issue with the matinee thing is it's so transparently greedy. I would rather they raise the prices across the board than trample on the concept of a matinee.
And is it too much to ask for a cartoon and a news reel before the picture starts? Feh!
Like most families, my people consider anything built by an ancestor to be precious, precious, precious. Most things even owned by an ancestor a few generations back are untossable.
In most cases, this stuff is pretty kickass -- a sturdy dining room table from my maternal grandfather, a coffee table that was once my great grandmother's crib. But, there is also some merely okay stuff that we'll be required to schlep around the country for hundreds of years to come, just because an ancestor made it.
Halfway through putting together "Markot," an Ikea cubby-hole bookshelf thing that will hold Tiny E's precious 1950s Japanese ceramics, I wondered:
"Does this count?"
Will this thing be priceless if Tiny E and I don't toss it ourselves? After all, isn't this the modern equivalent of building your own simple but functional furniture? It did take me multiple hours, and I had to use both kinds of screwdriver. It's probably as close as TomTalk Jr. is going to hand-crafted furniture, anyway.
And what about the rest of the crap in this house? Will our box of musty video tapes someday be obligatory treasures just because we bought them? Technically, we even MADE some of them (e.g. HBO shows taped off borrowed TV before we had our own cable).
Alls I know is I'll be one smiling mofo ghost if Tiny E and I force our grumbling descendants to pack this treasure up for the flight to America 2, The Moon:
If you came with a warning label, what would it say?
Submitted by chris.
"jerk"
