Author: Joel M.

Ring in the new year

Happy New Year all of you guys…

I got sick but thank heaven it was not with the flu… just some nasty headache/sniffles/sore throat/achy joints/phlegmy discharges disease. I will be well in a few, and I even managed to survive working from 7-11 this morning at Panera. Much to the chagrin of me and the few other pitiable workers who were subjected to such abject torture there were quite a few idiot customers who came in. There were even people who called the store BEFORE we even opened doors this morning… I mean, come on people! It is New Year’s Day! Stay home. That phonecall alone indicated two things: 1. that the person in question was already AWAKE at 7:30am on New Year’s Day and 2. that they fully intended to come in and make me SERVE them on New Year’s Day. I tell you that it is disgusting. And that is my cheerful New Year’s Rant.

In other news I’ve made a resolution to stop complaining about work related poop. 🙂

I will catch all of you folks on the flipside hopefully.

~Sicky

2003: Wha Happen?!?

Joel’s 2003 Year In Review

I suppose I should start reviewing the year by breaking it down into categories. You know, for organizational purposes. And I suppose like all Year In Review essays, this one should begin with the obvious: Our ubiquitous President.

This year has been a very headstrong year for the Prez. He has seen a war waged, another country torn asunder by our unfathomable military might, the capture of a madman, the lack of support from our conceited European comrades, and the repeated threats from a piddling Asian nation with a reckless dictator at the helm. All the while, pleasing the press with zillions of funny quotes, enough to fill up a sequel to the book George W. Bushisms. “The trouble with the French is that they don’t have a word for ‘entrepeneur’” and “By dethroning Saddam we have not only freed the American people, but have made it safer for our own people.” Anyhow, I still love him as a President, and considering that Howard Dean is the most prominent challenger in the upcoming election, no doubt Dubya will come out the victor once again.

Next up is my roundup of major catastrophes of the year. The spring and summer passed without so much as a massive earthquake or devastating hurricane. But in July a gargantuan super-cell thunderstorm shredded Northwest Ohio, reaching its peak fury while rushing through Bowling Green. A good chunk of one of the trees flanking the driveway to my house was torn off by winds reaching in excess of 90mph. The roof to the Moore Musical Arts center bit the dust, and a chunk of the Field House wall was blown in. The entire overhang at the Meijer Gas Station was blown away. Trees fell, houses were crushed, cars crumpled like tissue paper, and the city suffered a cumulative $147,000 worth of damage. Ouch. B.G. recovered though. The whole nation winced in August, when a power outage that began in my beloved Ohio rippled across eight states and put an estimated 50 million people out of power. I was in the midst of a Final Cut Pro class at the exact moment that the ripple tore through Bowling Green. Our computers flickered off and then auxiliary power took hold and we continued class. Gradually we began to notice the scope of the outage. Hurricane Isabel was the next big thing to beat us up and it turned parts of Maryland into an estuary.

Logically following my scatterbrained observations about catastrophes comes my critique of the popular culture. So far we saw gay tastes becoming very very very chic, even though gay lesbian bisexual and transsexual people comprise a very tiny fraction of our society, somehow they purport to have a far greater importance to the popular culture than anything else. Shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Queer as Folk, even Surprise By Design have flaunted the gay element. New shows that grew in popularity included The O.C., a drama about a poor kid living with rich kids in California. Alias had another smashing season, according to its fans. The Sopranos continued on
 who cares. Six Feet Under and CarnivalĂ© on HBO garnered more attention. CSI spawned half a dozen other spinoff shows. But I don’t watch TV so I don’t really care about all that crap. In music Norah Jones became the new front-running musician by winning five Grammys while groups like Fountains of Wayne, Switchfoot, Good Charlotte and The Ataris broke into the mainstream. Johnny Cash died and that was enough to cause a fountain of re-releasing, tributes and biopics to spurt forth. Barry White died and that was enough for a lot of people to go out and promptly listen to his soothing voice over and over and tell themselves that he wasn’t dead
 in fact he was still alive in binary on a silver disc and singing especially just for them. In films Chicago mopped up at the Academy Awards, winning Best Picture, while The Pianist made off with Best Director and Best Actor
 a funny coincidence because Roman Polanski cannot get his award or he will be incarcerated on U.S. soil on charges of Statutory Rape. But everybody knew that already. The Two Towers was only nominated for 6 awards and it took home 2 of them
 for technical achievements.

I will save up all of the rest of my movie opinions for Joel’s Oscar Preview edition later on in a month or so.

Now here come the lists! First off I have the top 10 movies that I saw IN THE THEATER this year:

1. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

2. Cidade de Deus (City of God)

3. Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away)

4. Adaptation.

5. School of Rock

6. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

7. X2: X-Men United

8. L’homme du tren (Man on the Train)

9. 28 Days Later

10. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Next up is the top 10 movies that I saw ON VIDEO/DVD/TELEVISION (for the first time) this year:

1. Braveheart

2. In The Bedroom

3. The Elephant Man

4. About Schmidt

5. Ed Wood

6. The Man Who Wasn’t There

7. Braindead (Dead Alive)

8. Lost In la Mancha

9. GATTACA

10. Holes

Yeah so a few of those films are old I know and it probably comes as a shock to some of you that I had never seen them up to this year, but I swear on my honor that it was the very first time I’d seen these wonderful movies.

I’m also including the top 10 movies that I need to see in the next few weeks here so that my life can be complete:

1. The Last Samurai

2. Mystic River

3. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

4. Big Fish

5. Lost In Translation

6. Bubba Ho-Tep

7. Love Actually

8. Girl With a Pearl Earring

9. Capturing the Friedmans

10. The Matrix Revolutions

Notice that Cold Mountain is not the list, even though there are a number of actors in it that I would enjoy seeing (Giovanni Ribisi, Brendan Gleeson, Natalie Portman) who don’t have the big sappy roles that Jude Law and Nicole Kidman have.

Next up is (don’t forget!) the top 10 fricken’ worst movies that I saw this year anywhere, could have been in the theater, on video or DVD, and hopefully not on TV, because I don’t watch TV so I don’t care about all of that crap. The funny thing about crappy movies is that you can easily make fun of them. It is for this reason that I probably watched most of the movies on this list with Jeremy Cordy. Here goes:

1. Freddy Got Fingered (almost as bad as Dudley Do-Right)

2. Severed (A home movie starring Bono and some guy with make up on)

3. Coyote Ugly (lots of promiscuous sex)

4. Freddy Vs Jason (lots of naked girls and then two invincible monsters fighting each other forever and never winning or losing)

5. Saving Silverman (Jason Biggs is always funny in a stupid way
 but the movie proved Neil Diamond lo be a moron)

6. Revolution (Al Pacino gave an intensely thankless performance in this movie about
 painful accuracy paid to the revolutionary war recreation without any real thought given to a useful or entertaining story)

7. Scare Crow Slayer (a very entertaining story about a crazed living scarecrow)

8. Ravenous (Guy Pearce and Robert Carlyle eat people in this movie
 you should go rent it)

9. From Dusk Till Dawn (creative assets aside, I hated this movie)

10. Baby Watchers (I just had to find a way to put this on the list J)

Next up is the top 10 new bands that I have had the privilege of getting into this year. The criteria to be on this list doesn’t necessarily mean that the band itself is new or that I hadn’t heard of them before, just that I bought or otherwise obtained and got into music of theirs over the past calendar year. Here goes:

1. The Fire Theft

2. Kent

3. Folk Implosion

4. The Postal Service

5. Brian Eno

6. Luxury

7. Joe Christmas

8. Jets To Brazil

9. Radiohead

10. Hot Hot Heat

Next up is the top 10 songs for the year. I had to think long and hard about this one because there are so many songs that I freaking love. It has been a journey a year long to figure our which songs fit into the top 10, and there are quite a few omissions that I sadly had to make in order to get it down to 10, but nonetheless I feel good about this list. It is a good list. And here it is:

1. Heaven – THE FIRE THEFT

2. Saker Man Ser/Things She Said – KENT

3. One Part Lullaby – FOLK IMPLOSION

4. I Ruined It – JOE CHRISTMAS

5. Secret of the Easy Yoke – PEDRO THE LION

6. Johnny and Mary – THE NOTWIST

7. Black and White Film – THE GREAT FICTION

8. Brand New Colony – THE POSTAL SERVICE

9. Rocket Boy – JETS TO BRAZIL

10. An Ending (Ascent) – BRIAN ENO

Next up is the top 10 people who died this year. I rank these people according to the level of how much I will miss them, not on whatever the saps of the popular culture think. Here are the stiffs:

1. Mr. Rogers (I WILL miss this man and his tattooed arms indicating how many men he sniped in WWII)

2. Earl Hindman (Tim Allen’s faceless neighbor Wilson on Home Improvement)

3. Johnny Cash (famous singing man with the deep throaty voice)

4. Katharine Hepburn (super mega famous actress from a bygone era)

5. Gregory Hines (famous dancing man)

6. Al Hirschfeld (famous New York caricaturist)

7. Bob Hope (famous entertainer of the U.S. and Allied troops through many wars)

8. Gregory Peck (To Kill A Mockingbird)

9. John Ritter (he played a former fat kid in IT)

10. Rod Roddy (famous voice announcer for 30 years on the infamous show The Price Is Right)

Well I suppose that about does it for Joel’s 2003 Year In Review. Be on the lookout around January 17th for my Oscar blog entry, since that is the due date for the Academy voting ballots. Then on January 27th we’ll see if I was right in who would get nominated. Then I’ll make my predictions of who will win, and then we’ll see if Joel really understands the twisted and labyrinthine awards process of Hollywood once and for all!

Goodbye, and Auld Lang Syne everybody! Happy New Year (in a bit) J

Give the gift of giving!

Well my friends, it has been about 1.3 billion nanoseconds since I last posted something nice and worthwhile to this wretched weblog.

For starters, Christmas happened. I mean, it just came and went. For cripes sake, at 12:01am Thursday began and at 11:59pm it ended, leaving exactly 2 minutes of time unaffiliated with any specific day to duke it out in the dark nethers of theoretical mathematic reasoning. And then Christmas was over. The world jolted back into groggy wakefulness again, hooked up a caffeine drip to its varicose veins and prompted started shooting up while going back into full psychotic swing.

Needless to say, it was time to visit my long lost sweetheart out in Cuyahoga Falls, OH. Somewhere along the line though, I forgot to tell some of my friends that I was going to visit her out the goodness of my heart for a day and 6 hours. Jeremy called up Tess and I talked to him, he wanted to play video games. So did I. I was 120 miles away… so it didn’t quite happen. Better job on communication next time I will do!

But I had a spiffing time with her nonetheless and came back with 5 chapsticks, some soap, a blanket, some nice smelling stuff from a bottle, a special box, a CD, and a dozen laminated cartoon strips. Ahhhh. From my parents and my grandma I got an awesome backpack that is made for laptops and school – the exact perfect thing that I needed. No bookcases, but that is okay because they aren’t requied… a backpack is! Also I got The Lion King on DVD! The movie is awesome but a good 50% of the extras are beyond retarded. There is an enthralling game with Timon where you can grab bugs for about forever, without ever stopping. You can grab them from one of four holes. And this is what you do, forever… never stopping. There are a few other crappy features and some really annoying repetitious voiceover dialogue running in the background. The movie is still a masterpiece. I also got the new Jars of Clay, which has repropelled them to the forefront of my spectrum of favorite bands ever. The list is currently as follows:

1. The Fire Theft/Sunny Day Real Estate

2. The Notwist

3. Jars of Clay

4. dc Talk

5. Coldplay

6. Blindside

7. They Might Be Giants

8. The Flaming Lips

9. The Waiting

10. Kent

Or something like that. Who We Are Instead is the name of the CD and I got the special Limited Edition 2 disc set! Woooo! Also I got some other nice goodies but those are mostly the kind that you don’t write about because they are uninteresting to other people. Plus, when you do nothing but write about yourself you most assuredly come off as callous and self-centered, egocentric and delusional and insensitive.

Well, Jeremy has just phoned me up and I must answer the call of nature and go fellowship with him on his s*x bed and play with his new entertainment system. Ciao.

P.S. It is nearing the end of the year so be on the lookout for Joel’s 2003 Year in Review… I’m going to do it and it’s going to be spiffing wot wot!

Jesus can come back now

I have just been to see The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

If I were justin edwards I would write a bunch about it and then tell you that I give it an A+. If I were Roger Ebert I would rant and rave about how Peter Jackson finally woke up and made the film follow the books far more closely than the previous two films did and give you a thumbs up followed by four stars. If I were Christopher Borrelli I would let you know in great detail why this film solidifies the Lord of the Rings as the greatest film series ever and then tell you that I give it five stars. If I were the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences I would acquiesce just this once and fork over all of the possible Oscars to this film that I can find to nominate it for.

But I am none of those things. I am Joel Manahan, long time Tolkien fan, longer time film fan, lifelong fantasty fan, and big huge fan of Jesus coming back. And I am here to tell you that this film will rock your world. It is the best out of the series and I mean that with my whole heart. I simply cannot wait until I can sit down in my comfy chair, plug in disc one of the Fellowship Extended and sit there, swapping discs every hour and a half until I finished up on disc three of the Return of the King.

Gaul, I can’t wait to go and see this one a few dozen more times.

Goodnight world.

Smooching my way up the ladder of success

Kissing buttholes is the only way to go up the ladder to success people. Pray for me as I attempt to do just that in my interview with Buckeye Cablesystem Sports Network for a co-op position today.

On break

Well I am on a break from work right now! And I thought that I’d see fit to write for a minute in the tiny space of time I have from now until I have to go back. I need to eat my lunch (mmmm, Asiago Roast Beef on Asiago Foccacia with onions, lettuce, LOTS of horsey sauce and a Chicken Caesar Salad) and then I need to shower (I smell of onions and rosemary and B.O., NOT a good combination, plus my hair is plastery) and then I need to pack up my goodies because I will be working up until 519 starts since some poor girl couldn’t close tonight because she has the flu. Do not get the flu guys. Because I don’t want to get it… oh and I don’t want to throw up, even though it feels awesome after you throw up… until you feel queasy again, and then you throw up… and then you feel awesome again!

So I used the iTunes Music Store for the first time, I knew that I had to wait until I could go to Mike’s house and abuse his speedy Roadrunner network connection to do it. It was cool. I splurged on Heavenbound by dc Talk, The Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo) by Manfred Mann (originally by Bob Dylan), Moses by Coldplay, Where The Streets Have No Name by U2, and another track that I will not divulge but it was performed by James Galway and Glenn Spreen 🙂

The new iBook G4 is working out wonderfully and it is sort of still my baby, though I’ve begun to take it on the road with me and even let other poeople touch it! Jeremy saw the little cap to the power supply and decided that it was a tasty candy and chewed and sucked on it for a while before I asked what had happened to my power supply cap and then he realized what it was.

Oh yeah, and I think that I’m done with Christmas shopping finally for the year. Lord knows I’ve spent a load this year, and mainly because I could 🙂

Well I am hungry and still smelly so I will say goodbye for now my bloggies. One day I will have something worthwhile to post again, until that day pine with all your hearts for Jesus to come back… hopefully after Christmas because I want to get my presents first.

Adjusted

Well I think that I am well adjusted to using my brand new spiffy computer and it will serve me well. I also hope to use it to blog some more seeing as I have been silent for a number of days. Don’t worry, I will find something worthwhile to write here eventually.

Clue

Well I am at Mike’s house right now working hard at uploading new pilfered software to my computer from his. 🙂 Tess is here and working diligently at her homework, she is such a good role model for everyone to follow all of the time all over the globe since the ages of the sun and the moon began to take shape in the womb of the cosmos. Oh, and Jeremy is here talking about ripping off something important from the body of a famous gay musician. And he’s doing a slow advance of his finger on Tess, who is objecting loudly. Mike is entranced by the gay propaganda in his Onion Ad Nauseum book and I am stil typing.

On the brighter side of things I had a good day at work, busting my butt at Panera selling crap to people and cleaning the crap off of the dishes and crap like that and also making more crap for the coffee pots and wiping the crap from the tables and sweeping the crap off the floors. All day long listening to very bluntly dirty music that my coworker brought in. Then he left finally and I played some good music and hid in the back with a cup of Pepsi and a spatula to defend myself from anything and everyone with.

Jeremy is excited about his new film idea “3 Days Ago” which will be a combination of Back to the Future and Clockstoppers and Baby Watchers all put together. Hopefully this one will get off the ground instead of languishing in the shade of an elm tree like stupid lazy Hush Money Embezzlement did. Anyhow I plan to help out and be D.O.P. again whenever things get rolling. It’s looking like I will have more time next semester for fun and games since I will have no Panera and no school, just a job doing a co-op for some measure of money.

“We are talking about marriage out of wedlock” Mike and I speaking to a confused Tess… none of you would understand either 🙂