Short review of the game Call of Duty ran in the paper today. I could have gone on about this game for another 40 inches, but instead, my piece was chopped by a third. Ah well.

I got this on Wednesday:

To whim it may concern: 11-26-03

Please pass this on to the proper people.
i was in one of your waterburger stores in the lewisville,tx.area and i noticed your help was not wearing gloves. this young mexican was putting onions on a burger without gloves.i decided that i did not want to eat there.there's a
BIG health issue there,and someone needs to be aware of it.if i see this again i will turn it over to the health dept,and let them deal with it.
Respectfully Yours

I wrote back telling them that despite the "Are what you eat" axiom, that I'm not, in fact, Whataburger. I also asked if they were sure it was a Mexican.

I'm sorry to have bothered you.being you don't work for waterburger,i'll call there home office and report it.as for the other yes he was.

So if you live in Lewisville, watch out for Mexicans handling your onions without gloves at Whataburger.

One nice way to feel like you haven't completely lost the memory of former soil is to have friends where you used to live who blog. (It helps if they know a lot of your other friends and if they work in similar media outlets than the ones you used to.)

My friends Adam and Lori both have blogs now, which is even cooler because they're a married couple, so I get to sometimes read two perspectives of the same story. They also have a child, the thought of which still scares juices from my body (their child, Emma, isn't the part that scares me -- she's quite adorable. I mean the thought of having a child of my own. Could you imagine? Do they make pre-natal Ritalin?), but their blogs have sort of eased and lulled me into at least considering the possibility that my seed might one day violate a willing egg. Feel free to wipe that last sentence from your memory if it just gave you the willies.

Another married couple that recently joined the blogoverse (blogosphere? Blogalaxy?) is the Meat 'o Cheese and Allison. Except, I don't think Allison is blogging. (In fact, legends tell of Allison cutting down people with a scabbard who dare to call Hate Your Daddy a "Blog." Said scabbard wound also comes with a painful gypsy curse, one that runs up your credit card debt and turns ever meal into watery diarrhea. A mule also kicks you at the height of passion. [Not passion with the mule, of course. I mean some passion you're experiencing with someone you want to be with. The stamp of the mule is a badge you'll wear of Pleasurus Interruptus. If it was the mule you were gettin' with, I would imagine for most that the interrupting kick would be a blessing. This curse doesn't work like that.] The woman doesn't like the word "Blog," if you get my meaning.)

It's Friday. I'm at work. I'm bored. Reading lots of Web sites. Thinking about mule curses.

So. Full.

I'd list all of the food items here, but the turkey toxin has slothed me to stupordom. I can only drool and type.

P.J. and I stayed up late and played lots of videogames, then we watched some of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. How tragic and inevitable was it that they made Clay Aiken sing on top of the chocolate float with the huge display of the word "Hershey's" right underneath him?

Anyway, back to my coma.

So, I'm kind of annoyed right now because I just got a very snippy e-mail from someone who's in the habit of sending me snippy e-mails, CC:ing it to everyone in the world, then apologizing to me in private a few hours later for sending the snippy e-mail. I mean, fuck that. Seriously. Either don't send the snippy e-mail in the first place, or don't apologize for it. Because that's just idiotic. And it's the holidays. Just -- go eat turkey or something.

Speaking of turkeys...

Bad Santa: Like 99 percent of the moviegoing public, I find Billy Bob Thornton to carry all sorts of viruses and parasites as a human being, but as an actor, he's had a pretty varied career and this one has the strength of a very good director (Terry Zwigoff of the fantastic Crumb and the even better Ghost World). It's got Bernie Mac, Lauren Graham, the last film performance of John Ritter. What the Hell more could you want? Well, from the sounds of it, some laughs in this comedy would be nice. The movie does have the dwarf factor working for it (Dwarves are huge this year: Elf, the fantastic Station Agent, um... Lord of the Rings.), and not only is this a dwarf, but it's a profane and shit-talking dwarf. That's some good dwarf right there. Maybe I'll go see it.

The Haunted Mansion: This was just ok. In fact, I struggled mightily to give it the appropriate number of stars (we annoint stars delicately, the way some plastic surgeons give noses or boobs). See, I didn't like it as much as Elf, which I gave three stars, but I didn't dislike it as much as Cat in the Hat, which I mistakenly gave two stars. (Looney Tunes was a stinky one star.) So... what do I give it? We're not allowed to give half-stars (for reasons that precede my tenure and that involve the phrase, "Shit or get off the pot"), so I'm sort of stuck. I settled on two stars because the more I thought about it, the more Jennifer Tilly's disembodied green head annoyed me. (As it will annoy you if you see the film.) You can read my full review here.

The Missing: I don't like Westerns. There. I said it. I'm just not a fan. And no matter how craggy Tommy Lee Jones' face is in this movie, or how bad-ass it is to see Cate Blanchett holding a rifle, you just will not see me paying money to see a movie about The Old West. Not gonna happen.

Timeline: Why? Why, God, why? Why do bad movies happen to us? What part of Your Plan does this fall under? Do you hate Michael Crichton? Why not just smite him? In the review I edited, I saw the titles of all the bad Michael Crichton adaptations, and, woo-whee... Lots of bad movies. Check it out: Congo, Sphere, Jurassic II, III and the Ride: More Fucking Dinosaurs, The 13th Warrior. Michael Crichton is like a bad flu that somehow infected Hollywood. Somebody over there needs to Thera-Flu his ass. God?

The Singing Detective: This goes under my, "In an alternate universe, Robert Downey Jr. is the biggest movie star there is and didn't fuck his life up" file. By all accounts, he's great in this movie, but the movie itself sounds pointless: Why try to remake what sounds like the greatest TV miniseries ever done? (That point is arguable, of course, and given that I haven't seen it, I can't even argue the point with any vim or vigor. But I do plan to watch it on DVD soon. Yeah, right. I can't even find time to watch T3.) Oh, funny story. I got an e-mail from a local psoriasis association asking us to do a feature story about their organization to tie in to the movie release. That's why I love my job.

A Woman is a Woman: Jean-Luc Godard film. It's all French and stuff. I am Captain Ignorant of the Planet Ignoramus.

DVDs: Got Seabiscuit and Whale Rider in the mail, so I'm hoping to maybe see those on Turkey Day. Other than that, there's still T3 to watch, Alias, and Frida, who has wrapped herself in a cast and isn't speaking to me anymore.

Sars is the perfect person to write the definitive Thanksgiving Day With The Family entry because her sentences are like tasty, nourishing meals with all the trimmings. Go check it out.

You can check out the news segment online now at the LCP Web site. There are HI and LO-res links to it off the main page (scroll down a bit). You even get to see the little commercial spot they did leading up to it. Bonus!

Movies This Week is coming in a few hours. In the meantime, you can also read my review of The Haunted Mansion.

A new XL Blog entry is up with some random heres and theres. Boy, those Austin360 folks sure do like playing with PhotoShop.

First off, does that makes sense that I'm referencing "Theeeeeeese nuts?" from The Chronic up there? No? Not really? Well, I tried.

New recap of Smallville is up and ready for your perusal. Come on, it's a holiday week. You'll have time to read it.

Includes a truly good ending and plenty of Hootie and the Blowfish shoutouts. Enjoy.

The Fox 7 story turned out to be a pretty lengthy feature piece (part of their "Texas Stories" series) about our comedy group, including clips from our videos, interviews, a few testimonials from people attending one of our local shows, and some on-stage performance footage. (Nick and Adrian just added some of our on-stage video to the official site.) If we end up putting a video capture of the news segment, I'll let you know.

Overall, it was nice to finally get props in our hometown for six years of work. The promos continued running through the evening broadcasts leading up to the news, including The Simpsons and my new favorite comedy, Arrested Development. You can't ask for much better comedy promotion than to be a commercial during The Simpsons.

It was exciting. There we were. On the evening news. And none of us were in handcuffs or burning down an apartment complex. I did keep hoping they wouldn't feature us after the story about newly homeless people, after the story about the soldiers being dragged through the streets in Iraq or right after the segment on child abuse. They came back fresh from a commercial to us, so the worst the lead-in could possibly be was a commercial reminding people that they have heartburn. They came out of the segment saying we're embarking on a "National tour," which is very Important Sounding and optimistic, and it turns out, true. We perform in Chicago in January for their big Sketchfest on January 9 and 10.

If you live in the Austin area, watch Fox 7 News tonight at 9 p.m. (The evening local news on Fox, not literally the Fox News channel.) They're doing a big story on the Latino Comedy Project, including lots of video snippets from our shows and some interviews. We talked to them a few weeks back and it looks like they made good on their promise to showcase us given that they're doing promos all day for the segment. In fact, they were showing the clips during the Dallas Cowboys game, which was pretty exciting -- as you probably already know, we Latinos love our Dallas Cowboys. I'm hoping lots of people watch.