I know there’s been a backlash against The Muppets and a backlash against The Muppets and as we were doing this video, it made me a little sad to realize that I fell right in the middle; I just don’t really have an opinion on The Muppets right now. I still find them funny when I watch them, but I don’t go out of my way to seek them out and my kids haven’t yet latched onto them. (Although Carolina’s favorite thing to say right now is, “ELMO! ELMO! ELMOOOOOO!”)
The first movie I ever remember my parents taking me to was The Muppet Movie. I don’t even remember the movie, I just remember the experience of going and hearing my dad tell people how much he liked the movie, too.
So, I really hope the movie is good and maybe we’ll end up taking the kids and they’ll remember that experience someday. Maybe Elmo will make a cameo and that will really make it memorable for Carolina.
Illustration by Don Tate II / Austin American-Statesman
Today, I’m at home on the first day of a week-long vacation. It starts with Halloween and ends with the first day of Wurstfest, which seems to me to be some kind of divine calendarification, evidence that sausage and ghosts and perhaps God are all working together in some way. Maybe two out of three of those, at least.
The work trip I wrote about last time went fine. The kids were well-behaved and went to bed on time and there was even sleep to be had. That ended a week later when the weather changed, some allergens blew in and Carolina developed a bad, phlegmy cough (which sometimes leads to middle-of-the-night vomiting) that we’re still dealing with. Still, she just gets up and starts bouncing around when she wakes up, as if the psychic and also goopy wreckage of the night before never happened. She’s going to be one of those annoying people who never gets a hangover, I can feel it.
The vacation was… very necessary. We got more bad news at work last week. This was news that was scheduled. There was a meeting and a date and time for that meeting set and months of anticipation as to the things that would be announced at that meeting. All that was left were the details.
And yet, we’re all still devastated. We’re hurt and frustrated and knowing it was coming doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. This was the day before my last day at the office (which I ended up spending working from home). The last few weeks in general were really tough at work and I just bore down and tried to knock every single thing off my to-do list so that I wouldn’t have any loose ends or things to worry about when I was gone.
So here I am, first day of vacation, writing about work.
I wrote so much the last two weeks, a lot of it stories and blog posts scheduled to run later, that it’s going to look like I’m not even gone.
Last week, I did a Tech Monday column about Siri in which I asked her a bunch of questions about Texas and the lady of the iPhone 4S proved pretty convincingly that she’s no Texas belle.
Also in today’s paper was a short story about SXSW Interactive’s ScreenBurn and I have a few more things in the pipeline for the rest of this week and next. The blog’s been busy with lots of tech reviews that’ll run as an upcoming roundup column and lots of stuff about Apple’s iOS 5.
We’re taking the kids trick-or-treating tonight. My wife and I went to our first Halloween party in probably about six or seven years and we even worse costumes. Mine was not so well-received and I blame it on the party being in San Antonio where, apparently, “Breaking Bad” is not a thing people watch at all. I went as Walter White, meth cook extraordinaire:
We haven’t taken any photos of the kids in their costumes, but Lilly did get in some carving time yesterday:
Also on tap this week: new Trailers Without Pity season starts with The Muppets! That should be up in the next day or two.
Busy vacation! Hoping to do lots of writing, TV watching, de-cluttering, gym-going and Halloween candy eating.
It it quite true that my brother knows much more about sports than I do and that Aaron Sorkin probably does, too. Sorkin scripted the upcoming movie Moneyball, about baseball and sabermetrics (hey, wake up!), which stars Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s also our last Trailers Without Pity episode of the season. We’ll be back in late October with new episodes.
If you get bored the rest of the summer, you could check out the Trailers Without Pityvideo archive/episode guide. Fun times!
We’re down to the last two episodes of Trailers Without Pity for the season (we’re not even sure what the last one will be; we’re still deciding). Our penultimate video for Season Three is this one for the pec-tacular Conan the Barbarian, a remake (or a reimagining? I’m willing to bet it was more making than imagining at work here) of the Arnold early 80s sword and crotch-garb classic.
I’m a sucker for these kinds of movies (or at least mocking these kinds of movies from afar); my favorite episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 remains Cave Dwellers, starring Ator the Juiced. I could watch that a million billion times. The new Conan looks even dumber and more expensive. It’s kind of thrilling, really, how respectably goofy it looks.
Oh my goodness, do my brother and I love monkeys. I mean we LOVE them. We ARE them, in our dreams, I think. Goddamn a banana sounds good right now. I’d settle for a plantain, even. Know where I could score a plantain?
So… cowboys. They are dusty! And aliens. They are often shiny or slick with grossness! Put them together and you have… this movie thing.
Despite the potential of this concept, I wasn’t too thrilled about the initial trailer that ran during the Super Bowl; it feels way too on the nose and like a grim, money-extracting mechanism you install in a movie theater, not unlike an obligatory system software update.
The trailer we ended up looking at for our latest Trailers Without Pity video is a little more lively, but that’s like saying an old, sedentary man barely clinging to life is more sprightly than most zombies. It’s not exactly a useful comparison.
In any case, here’s our video for the Jon Favreau-directed Old West alien invasion movie Cowboys & Aliens.
