Like puzzle pieces from the clay

Last night I watched A Better Tomorrow II, or 英雄本色 2 in Hong Kong. (Wikipedia/IMDb) and it was great.
It tended to be a bit hard to follow – it started with ballroom dancing and beards, grew into police infiltration of crime organisations, flew over to New York for some hilarious “EAT THE FUCKING RICE, GUILAO” (I’m paraphrasing ruthlessly) at gunpoint (in response to a protection racket) and then had some mind-losing.

But don’t worry, it turns into a bloodbath.  Really.  It’s like the Matrix Lobby Scene with more blood and Asians.
So, shotguns are awesome, Asians are awesome, rice is awesome.  Oh, and this is where The Matrix got the Trinity-sliding-down-stairs-shooting sequence.

There’s money-printing, force-feeding, dancing, badly dubbed white people, and Chow Yun Fat.

I think we should all see it.  I liked it a lot, it was great fun.  I wouldn’t say it was my favourite film, or anything near it.
“You no like my rice” is hilarious. There are other funny bits too, naturally.
But it reminds us that one of the few good things to come from the 80s (in addition to Tetris, Rick Astley, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) is action films where cars explode like that.
*clicks fingers illustratively*

The other night we had Burritos.  Eventually, the resident Chinese homestays Matthew and Timber (yes, like ‘wood’) loaded the tortillas with rice.  Tim quite likes drenching everything in tomato sauce.
Anyway, rice.

I was going to blag about other things; being introduced to awesome and shockingly close places by Brendan and the state my bike is in.
Also, moats, lilies, haze and such.

I haven’t been blagging much, actually. I never really feel the urge to – I only do it when it’s just there.
You’ll notice from my growing Blagroll that more and more of my friends are succumbing.

Peace, I’m out (segues are for losers).
Time for sleep.  I love sleep.

Whoever shouts the loudest gets the most attention

I’m faster than a Chihuahua – one decided to chase me as I rode home. It gave up. I was not on a white stallion but a mountain bike, should you be imagining me in a heroic light.

I’m living up my last teenage years, today I met Antho at the library. I returned those books on the Boer War, and took out some on Surrealism.

I’m breaking the habit of putting images at the very end of posts.  Mixing it up.  Because I’m exciting.

This Apple & Kiwi Fruit juice is very good, but is unattractive. It’s opaque and khaki. Like the shirts in the dress uniforms on M*A*S*H, or what you get when you mix all your paint together while washing it down the drain.
When I’m buying a drink, I want to be reminded of American courts martial in the early nineteen-fifties. Surgeons being tried for obscene behaviour make me thirsty, as does Alan Alda. I don’t have to explain why tipping acrylic paints down the drain is appetising.

Do not distress, the long drought of Peach Ice Tea has been remedied.

Today was slightly too warm. The supermarket in Unley has user-operated checkouts now, with a tall guy to watch over them.

Everything is painted woodland grey, except for the trimmings which are a strong green. The floorboards are real, but an unwelcoming dull stain. It’s all modern and clean, but it is neither coloured like a medical research centre or a trendy apartment building.

Bow-ties suit my personality too well for me to wear them. They would take me into the extreme. I should be tempered by my clothing.

I slept well last night.

Don’t let yourself destroy yourself

At 5:30 this evening, the sunlight was a curious amber.  The clouds were a peach colour, yet the sky behind them was a rich blue.  At the fluffier edges, it blurred into purple, and the stubby yet brightly coloured rainbows in the east.  Slightly surreal, with colours normally associated with HDRI photos.

The overall effect was a mormon propaganda piece. Why the mormons? Well, I notice that their website is quite attractive.

It didn’t rain today.

I went for a walk after dark last night, with no phone or wallet.  Mainly because it was completely spontaneous.  I went through two parks, up a road even bendier than the one I recently discovered (they’d be the same if they were properly lined up), and discovered where my bus turns around.

It’s always muddy in the long thin park with olive trees.

I’ve recently gotten into a pile of new music, and approve of the vastly improved automatic recommendation system on last.fm.

Wow, this was a short one.

Trapped in yourself, break out instead

Ok, I thought I’d cover the holidays, before it gets into the distant past.  It was a two week holiday between terms, and a week has already passed since it finished.  I could have blogged four times while it was happening, but it was a holiday, and I do not think that is time best spent blogging.

I took three friends over to Kangaroo Island at the beginning of the holidays, and this time it was not all on fire.  We were therefore able to go to the tourist spots, which we naturally decided to do on the day with the … least friendly weather.  I will be getting the photos of us leaning into the wind, tomorrow.

There is now a video on YouTube of me at Remarkable Rocks, in a corridor type formation, struggling against very strong wind.  You can hear their laughter, as it begins to hail, and I scream in pain.  This is, I think, the third video with me in it.  The first currently has 28,499 views merely because a certain someone uploaded it with a misleading name.

I put on a few kilos, which I have already lost.  All have conceded that both of my parents are excellent cooks.

We played Risk a couple of times, and there was much stomping of Ukraine.  We did this during Rugby matches and late night films.  Oh, we watched some good films, we watched some fun films, we watched an atrocity.

And to put this atrocity in perspective, The Godfather and V for Vendetta are good, Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze and Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie go in the “fun” category.  Yes, the 1992 Jim Henson Ninja Turtles film has the best opening sequence ever, involving a teen pizza deliveryman who knows martial arts fighting a large mob of thieves.  Did I mention that he’s asian?  The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles intervene, there are giant flowers, a snapping turtle, a wolf, a Samurai who lives in a car yard and Vanilla Ice doing the Ninja Rap.

Anyway, in Turbo, the lion Munchkin wizard creature from the planet with a blue filter was captured by the scantily clad woman who lives in a submarine with mutants, where the Munchkin’s mate and child are being held hostage.  He then reluctantly takes her to an island in a parallel dimension, so she can marry a lava monster (which she begins to have doubts about).  Being the “Queen of Evil” is not quite worth being married to a sentient molten rock formation.

Of course, the Power Rangers must also go to this parallel dimension, which they achieve by somehow getting their Zords (Transformers cars) onto the Ghost Ship.  Yes, a dilapidated wooden ship will take them to another dimension.

Did I mention that the police are stupid, the blue ranger is a child (yes, it’s a film of that season), and the pink ranger has an Australian accent?

Anyway, there are fight scenes, explosions, mecha fight scenes, dodgy cuts, volcanoes erupting and a bald man’s head in a giant tube..  If that doesn’t make sense, the good guys win.

So, that was the fun and bad one.  What about the atrocity I mentioned? I should skip to the far side of the next picture now, if I were you.  It’s more fun that way.

It is called Soul Plane, and stars ‘Snoop Dogg’ as an ex-con who was trained to fly by terrorists.  This is the poorest taste film I have ever seen.

When a man who is not Chris Tucker is stuck to a toilet seat in an aeroplane, and through the window sees his dog being sucked into a turbine, mid-flight, the jury of a civil court awards him one hundred million dollars.  I’m shocked that anyone would misrepresent the court system so.

This sounds like a lot of money, but it is not enough to build ‘Terminal X’ (or ‘Terminal Malcom X’ for long), buy a heavily customised full-size jumbo jet painted in purple livery, and hire a full crew.  A white family is transferred to the maiden flight, and they too are terrible caricatures.  The jet has hydraulics.  And I mean the pointless kind that rice-cars have, along with sub-woofers and furry dice.

I … don’t want to talk about how bad it is, any more.  It has the most juvenile humour I’ve ever come across.

I’m disgusted.  I’m insulted.

I’m ashamed for everyone in it.

It’s the most racist film I’ve ever seen.  The co-pilot is African, and there is a Muslim on the plane.  What is the least tasteful way these characters could be treated?  They did it.  They did it to women, blind people, white people, gays, and every black stereotype yet.  And I hate them all, and they deserve it.  The characters are all repulsive.

We laughed less and less, as we realised that it wasn’t going to get any better. I’m going to give you some links with which to follow this up, as I’m washing my hands of this.

(Link) IMDb User Comments

I am agreeing with the negative ones, naturally.  You can also look it up on Wikipedia if you like, but they are expected to follow the neutrality policies.

This is ruined now.  I don’t feel like blogging about the other awesome things we did, or things that have happened since.  Not how warm my hands are or a strange dream I had.

I may be gone for some time.  I hope this hasn’t spoiled everything.

I’d like to point out that we spent more time watching good movies than bad, and we had fun.  It was 2 in the morning, and this crime against man seemed funny at the time.

Nothing to do with me.

I’m ambivalent to Last.fm’s new look.  Some things are massively improved, but a lot of things are disappointing.  Unlike deviantArt, which looks better than ever – which is just great, for a site I never use.

DDoS, on my 4chan?

Yeah, so.  We’re back at school, and seeing everyone again is great.  Some lessons are dread.

Ooh, we had bonfires, to burn all the wattle that had fallen in the storm.

The title of this post is a lyric.  I’d be a bad person not to tell you that.