Baby, it’s REALLY FRICKIN’ COLD outside. I’ve always considered myself to be fairly weather hardy for an Angeleno, but I’m about to crack. It’s been consistently cold and rainy the past few days and I can’t take it anymore. I caught a bug from one of my co-workers, so I’m starting to feel very sick again. Ever since I started working at the UCLA Hospital I’ve gotten sicker at a much higher frequency than I used to. I’m sure I’ll be the first American to die of ebola.

Since I didn’t leave the house this weekend except feeding times, I watched a LOT of TV. The best time I had was a couple of hours ago when I watched an episode of Jackass. The first segment reminded me that there’s very little funnier than a man getting hit in the genitals. Johnny Knoxville, protected only with a cup, got kicked, paintballed, sledge-hammered etc repeatedly. I feel for his girlfriend. If you watch the segment carefully, you can hear Spike Jonze behind the lens laughing his ass off.

There was also a brilliant episode of King of the Hill, where Hank became a pimp (hooker played by Renee Zellweger, archnemesis pimp played by Snoop Dogg).

Even the Simpsons was good tonight, unfortunately a rare, rare occurence these days.

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So I’m listening to my newly acquired “In the Mood For Love” CD… and it doesn’t have the song “In the Mood for Love!” The version they play in the trailer is the Bryan Ferry cover, which is easy enough to track down. I’ll have to go hunting for that CD this weekedn, I guess.

This is one the worst soundtrack omissions I’ve seen recently. It’s right up there with “High Fidelity” not including Elvis Costello’s “High Fidelity.” They use the much less relevant “Shipbuilding” as the lone Elvis song on that soundtrack.

Why, Hollywood, why?

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This has got to be one of the funniest things I’ve read in a good month. What happens when you get on Hunter S. Thompson’s bad side? A hollywood exec got this in her mailbox. It’s a never a good sign when Hunter opens the letter “okay, you lazy bitch.” God bless Hunter S. Thompson. I’m not sure why people try and bother making HST movies anyway. The best part of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was the voiceover… just because it had huge chunks of genuine HST prose in it. Everything else was fluff.

I’ve got to go out and get some more Thompson. I’m afraid that I’ll start punctuating everything in a strange manner though.

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In the fastest cinema-experience to video-ownership of my personal history, I now own a copy of In the Mood For Love on DVD. The movie took forever to open in Los Angeles, so I ended up ordering the Hong Kong DVD of it about two days after I saw it in the theater.

The DVD is your standard HK quality. The movie is a bit better than that. I also bought the soundtrack, which comes in lovely packaging. Particularly intriguing is the dozen postcard photos of different scenes in the film. If I were more of an artistic type I’d figure out a way to mount it or something. They’re quite beautiful, and a great little momento to have of the film.

I was listening to the soundtrack with my roommate and he felt the need to point out how atrocious Nat King Cole’s Spanish accent was on the soundtrack. I think he was missing the point, but I let it go. There’s been a lot of letting go today.

Am I a penguin, letting everything slide?

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I was grabbing a quick dinner at Burger King today while I worked my late(r) shift at work, when I ran into John Mahoney. How strange is that?

Mahoney’s probably best known as Marty Crane on “Frasier”, but I will always know him as James Court, from “… Say Anything.” I was tempted to tell him that he was in my favorite movie, but I decided not to disturb him.

“I MAKE THEIR LIVES BETTER.”

That’s probably what I would have said to him, if I decided that celebrity doesn’t afford privacy.

But I didn’t.

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I caught a rerun of Frontline: Hackers on PBS tonight. The show is pretty standard stuff to start (hackers are bored kids fueled on caffeine, stumbling their way into destroying civilization as we know it) but it finishes strong. By the end of the hour, Frontline is exploring the idea of international cyberwar, including classes where they figure out contingency plans for such a war. It’s an interesting aspect that isn’t addressed in most mainstream press on hackers, so I’ll tip my hat to Frontline for that.

The show is a great little introduction for people unfamiliar with the territory. I didn’t see myself in the background in any of their Defcon 8 footage though.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are schools where you learn to specialize in computer security pretty soon. That’s definitely a part of IT that’ll blow up if things keep going the way they go. Hell, maybe I should learn some of that stuff.

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If there was any doubt as to who the X-Men comic is marketed to, I submit X-Men Uncovered. A webpage dedicated to all the times the X-Men get nekkid in all their 4-color glory.

People wonder why I don’t read X-Men anymore.

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Dale Earnhardt died at Daytona. I don’t like NASCAR, but it’s still sad news. Scary, scary stuff. The in-car footage that they had is particularly harrowing.

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I caught Hannibal tonight after being unable to find anything better to do. We didn’t really plan on Hannibal, but it became a coin flip situation between Hannibal and Down to Earth, the new Chris Rock film. I love Chris Rock, but that film looked horrible, so we chose Hannibal. I mean, worse comes to worse, we would have something to talk about at the water cooler. 56million dollars worth of ticket sales opening weekend can’t be wrong.

I had my doubts but I started to get excited when I saw people leaving the film early, saying stuff like “That was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.” To me, that’s a compliment.

Unfortunately, Hannibal turned out to be a boring affair, with the “disgusting parts” being a bit disturbing, but not terribly so. The film crosses the line from sick to comical in a hurry, and after that it’s just no fun at all.

Dead Alive (Brain Dead) is still my favorite gross-out movie of all time. I literally had convulsions because my digestive track wanted to go in reverse. Definitely not the movie to go along with a meal. Still, it’s so funny, entertaining and strangely endearing. Hannibal is none of these things.

As a sidenote, between Snatch and Hannibal there are all of a sudden way too many references to man-eating pigs.

Good thing there’s a lot of pig-eating men around. (Yes, if I were on Survivor II, I probably would have killed and eaten that pig. I’m not sure I could have handled the gutting and cleaning of it though).

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Jeez. This is better than Hamster dancing. If you liked “All Your Base Are Belong To Us,” buy the T-Shirt.

Best meme ever.

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