| Editorial - 29 September 2005 |
| Think I just found my first item for my next wishlist. It'll have to be for Christmas as my birthday just passed a few weeks ago. Bummer, will have to wait a few more months for this gigantic screen. If for any reason you have money to spare, mail me, I'll let you know where you can ship this wall-filler. |
| Editorial - 26 September 2005 |
| Last weekend I bumped into a link towards a site that calculates your deathday.
First you have to fill in a few pages of questions (and not just the usual two), but it doesn't take
that long. I can't remember on which site I saw it first and by now, almost all sites are mentioning
it. Anwyay, go here and get your estimate.
According to them, I'l die in May 2056 of a heart attack. I will have lived for 81,7 years while the
average life span for a man is 72,5 years. That means I now only have lived 38% of my entire life.
This either means I will have a lot of time to do stuff I like and find other stuff to do, or I have
a lot of boring days (around 18535) to go. Right now I'm hoping the former and not the latter. I'm in
a good mood. I don't go to the theater as quasi-often as I used to a few years back - well, to be honest I used to go at max 4 times a year, now once every two years - but last sunday I just had to. A play with some modern dance, a choir and an orchestra ... a collection of short entwined pieces about love : from falling into love, having a fight, until even death. "Henry!" was at times funny, sweet, bitter and harsh. In my continuous journey towards becoming a "romantic soft sap" I sometimes found it a lirttle difficult to control my emotions. Some scenes were painfully recognisable, but others were to far away from my own world and compensated the harshness. And it wasn't all heartache either, here's a funny little joke from a scene : "It rides on a horse, is black and feels guilty. What is it ?" The answer is one of those typical "so ridiculous it becomes funny especially when you had too much to drink" answers : namely "Zorry". Song of the week : "We Are All On Drugs" Weezer Oldie of the week : "Runaway" Me First And The Gimme Gimmies Last seen movie : "Before Sunset" : comments are being written (see march 05). "Anklaget" : comments are being written. "The Animal" : Pretty daft comedy with Rob Schneider who becomes overwhelmed with animal instincts when he gets several animal organs transplanted into him after a serious carcrash. Most jokes work in a way that you start to smile, but some are dangerously borderline gross. Luckily they never go the step too far and it stays enjoyable. It's also quite short - 1 hour 23 minutes I think - so you really don't get the chance to get bored with the premisse. Doing this week : I'm halfway through the computermagazines I collected throughout the years. Threw almost everything away. Some articles were worth keeping, but most stuf was so outdated, it was too silly keeping it. And when I'm done with those (by wednesday ?), I'll start checking my collection of poems and songlyrics I wrote and collected throughout my late teens and early twenties. I recently rediscovered the box containing all that stuff and while sifting through found some pretty lame first drafts. I'm guessing there's lots more where that came from. Perhaps best to look it all over and throw away the excess junk. That way it'll fit in a binder instead of a cardboard box. |
| Editorial - 25 September 2005 |
| If you're an avid surfer an/or a moviefreak (like me), you must have heard
of the wonderful Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB)
by now. It's your one stop shop for news, reviews, announcements and an extensive list of information
about movies and television-series and all actors, directors and what more involved. Keeping track of all movies you saw can be a pain - especially if you want to tell other people about it. That's why I like the idea of twofifty.org. You can make an account and keep a list of the top 250 movies according to IMDB - which ones you saw and which ones you didn't see (yet). Via Manuel I got an invite for beta-testing the system developed by JefPober. Thanks to both ! Click the image to see my current listcount - 
- image will be below and on my personal-page as well. |
| Editorial - 20 September 2005 | ||
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| Editorial - 19 September 2005 |
| And there it is again : the indian summer. That's what Americans call the
extra few days of warm and sunny days in september when rain has been pouring down and you feel
autumn is just around the corner. Most probably it isn't a compliment towards Indians as it seems
that all words where "indian" is used have a derogative context. Indian giver being
the most obvious one : someone who gives something, only to take or steal it back. Gotta love the
sense of irony here ... Anyway, time to refer you guys to a few changes. RBBS has had a few updates in the news-section regarding the new consoles. If you're into that kind of thing, go check it out. Or you might want to try the redesign of Vendetta. Blog-enabled and starting from a standard template-design, I reworked the colours (I went for an experimental greenish palette) and Franky removed a column to the left (which was incredibly unwanted and taking up too much space). Song of the week : "7 Days, 7 Weeks" dEUS Oldie of the week : "Teenage Angst" Placebo Last seen movie : "Goodfellas" : comments are being written. "Be Cool" : disappointing follow-up to "Get Shorty" (which was good). Travolta, the ex-loanshark, is now a professional movie-producer, getting a little bored with the business. By sheer luck he meets a great young singer who wants to get out of her contract and get a better recorddeal. He takes over the contract and sets off into the music-business. Only to find bigger sharks, flipped out producers and gangsta-rappers with a house in the suburbs. All the elements for a good Elmore Leonard movie with sarcastic dialogue, but unfortunately, not only most actors are letting us down, but also the writing. It's a little hammy and stale and no one really seems to care. Unless maybe ex-professional wrestler The Rock who is playing a gay bodyguard. He seems to be enjoying himself so much in this a-typical role ... see it to believe it. You'll have to watch the rest of the movie as well and even I - as an Elmore Leonard fan - didn't like it. Be carefull. Doing this week : Continue with the archiving of the Lego material, clean the toilet and bathroom (each week another room) and finally try to end editing the best pictures I took and get them developed somewhere. |
| Editorial - 16 September 2005 |
| Today marks the 250th weekly newsletter that has been sent to subscribers of the mailinglist. I don't allow just anyone to enter the list - after all, this still is a site just for me and my friends - as I'm not in this for the money, fame or egoboosting. I've been posting on this site for years before blogs became popular and I've always only focussed on stuff for me and my friends. So the same had to count for the newsletters. Especially because sometimes they contain a little too much info about our personal lives. So if I ever turn the mailingarchive into a readable archive on the site, I will have to delete some entries. And that's time-consuming. But it might happen some day and then you'll have thousands of links, articles and newsitems. |
| Editorial - 13 September 2005 |
| The last couple of days and weeks have been weird. A day can be sunny
and warm and the next can be cold and rainy or foggy. It's hard to decide what to wear and do
and even harder if you don't have anything useful to do anymore. Song of the week : ----- Oldie of the week : ----- Last seen movie : "Blade II" : Wesley Snipes is back as the vampire who can walk during daylight and has a strong dislike for all other vampires. After moving to Eastern Europe, searching for his friend and mentor, Blade is approached by some vampires and asked to work with them against a new breed of vampires who feed on anyone, including their own. Knowing it might be a trap, Blade accepts in the hope of getting deep inside the vampires structure. The first movie was flashy, typical american and very red, this one is more european, greenish and extremely bloody. Director Guillermo Del Toro is by now well known for the great Hellboy movie, but this was the movie that got him accepted in Hollywood. When watching it I was thinking that it was a little over the top with the amount of blood and gore, but only a few times and now, a few days later, that feeling is totally gone. I liked it, maybe even as much as the first one which wasn't bad either, but I won't be buying or rewatching it. "Duplex" : Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymoore play a couple that's in the market for a bigger house. By sheer luck they stumble upon a house in Brooklyn with lots of room and even a second floor : a duplex. Unfortunately that duplex is inhabited by a very old woman whom they can not kick out. Seeing her age and health they decide to wait it out. But the old lady soon turns into a needy little hellspawn and has them run errands, annoys them with her loud television and comes barging in at any time. Things go from bad to worse and the couple decides to take matters in their own hands. Directed by Danny Devito and starring two good comedians it's too bad a lot of the scenes are predictable. Instead of being very funny, it's now just funny. Don't buy it, rent it. You'll enjoy it, even if it's just once. Doing this week : If I'm lucky I'll eat, sleep and do something useful. If not, well ... don't ask. |
| Editorial - 6 September 2005 |
| Today was my birthday. In my own eyes I'm getting way too old. Not only in
general, but also if I look at the way I lead my life, my hobbies and interests. In a way I've been
changing a few things already since, let's say June. I stopped playing my Xbox for instance and I've
been dumping a lot of kept memories : books, letters, little things in boxes. At the time I didn't
know why I was doing it and right now I'm not really sure either. I just know I'm getting "too old
for this shit", if I may quote the legendary Murtaugh from Lethal Weapon. Anyway, enough about that. I'd like to end with a shout out to one of my heroes when I was a teenager. Chuck D, main rapper in Public Enemy, was always a political and racial inspiration to me. His lyrics were never about dealing drugs, but about the position of minorities (whether they'd be black, hispanic, women or lower class americans) in the most democratic country in the world. He opened a few doors for me and I am really glad he's right on the money again with a new song about the New Orleans disaster. "Yeah, tell 'em like it is." |
| Editorial - 5 September 2005 |
Yesterday I went to my hometown. While "De Gordel" around Brussels is circling
all nearby villages, the people of Tervuren decided to have their giants walk through the center and
hold a flea market. Basic rural stuff, but when the sun is shining down on you, you can loose yourself
a while in the crowd. As I was too late for the giants (I didn't know the exact hour), I just looked
at the stuff that was being sold : old clothes, old children's toys and big dark wooden furniture
that wouldn't look good in my interior. I did see a black acoustic Takamine guitar and was immediately
interested, but unfortunately the neck was crooked - probably the reason why it was being sold. Nothing
worse than a crooked neck on such a beautiful instrument. An hour later I went to the local skatepark, hoping there'd be some action to shoot. Two french guys were pulling ollies over a bench and jumping a ramp as soon as I grabbed my camera out of the bag. One younger local guy wasn't as interested, but I did have a talk with him. Neither one of us was impressed by the french guys. Jumps are nice, but you do have to land 'em more than once.  I loaned the local guy's board for a few minutes in order to see what's left in my legs and mobility using a board on a miniramp and quarterpipe. Mostly muscle-spasms and a bit of pain. Too much, too soon, or just old age ? Hurt my knee when ollieing off a box (higher than the one on the picture above) when I came down. Damn thing immediately started acting up for a few minutes. Nothing I didn't knew already but still saddens me that I have to let go of so many things I love. It hurts you know ? Really does. Song of the week : ----- Oldie of the week : "Since You've Been Gone" Aretha Franklin Last seen movie : "The Storm Of The Century" : A recent production of a direct for television written script of Stephen King. It consists of three an hour and a half long episodes, so I guess you can also call it three movies. Unfortunately I only had the first two on tape, so I couldn't watch it all. But I had read the script / book a few years ago anyway, so I thought why not. It's the usual King stuff : a small rural town gets a strange visitation and normal citizens start to break down, unravelling the towns social fabric, until it even results in murder. In his books, King's the master in setting those scenes, depicting the every day life without getting boring, building the background for the characters. In his movies, it's usually much more flat. Characters aren't given the time and lines to set themselves. They come on screen and a few minutes later they're dead. Luckily this series takes the time to stay closer to the book. You're half way through the first film before anything eerie happens and it takes the second film to really build up the chills. Based on these two parts, I'll give it a thumbs up and will try to get my hands on part three sometime. "Pearl Harbor" : Rewatched it as it was the only decent movie on television. Way back in June 2001 I described it at being quite ok, but taking up too much screentime with the love-triangle story. I added that it was probably only for romantic saps. Well, guess what ? I'm older and appear to be a lot more like that as I liked it better this time around. It's actually not too long and sometimes you might get a little teary-eyed. But then again, maybe that's just me. The newborn soft sap. Doing this week : Whatever comes up and flows in my direction. |
| Editorial - 4 September 2005 | ||||
| America's breakdown, that could be the title combining the following two articles.
The first one is about the downfall of CBGB's : the club in New York where punk broke and started churning out
acts like The Ramones, Television and Blondie. Seems that no matter how much money they spend, the owner
no longer wants to rent it. Since Joey, Johnny and Deedee are all dead, the club's dead too. How fitting. The second story is a bit more in your face. I've got this one via Franky from Vendetta. The BBC is reporting that main stream media in America is finally getting over the muzzled post 9/11 syndrome and they're fed up with the incompetence of their leaders. Almost each and every one of them is openly criticising Bush's response to the flooding of New Orleans, by now probably already killing thousands, mostly due to the lack of organised aid.
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