Suburban Commando has been playing on cable and it has been years since I’ve last seen the low budget Hulk Hogan vehicle. So, of course, I decided to live tweet my observations:

My biggest question is how does Hulk Hogan read and speak english so well?#suburban commando8:14 PM Mar 24th

This movie is just one plot device ontop of another. Poor Christopher Lloyd had his work shop taken away! And just when #suburban commando8:19 PM Mar 24th

Hulk Hogan needed a place to stay. No Lloyd, don’t touch the Ray gun!!#suburban commando8:20 PM Mar 24th

OMG a wooden TV! #suburbancommando8:22 PM Mar 24th v

Why is there a mime in some back alley at 11 at night? #suburbancommando8:33 PM Mar 24th

Smart, Hulk Hogan, leave the key to the spaceship you hid in the abandoned disco attached to its underside.#suburban commando8:36 PM Mar 24th

The only thing Hulk Hogan doesn’t have in that spaceship is a flux capacitor#suburban commando8:39 PM Mar 24th

Hulk Hogan’s treatment of that cat goes against the character’s previous displayed love of animals. Lame.#suburban commando8:43 PM Mar 24th

Hulk Hogan avoided the effects of a Freeze Ray by drinking antifreeze.#suburban commando8:54 PM Mar 24th

I’m not sure if some of this writing is subtle jokes or just lazy. #suburbancommando8:56 PM Mar 24th

If you touch the evil general’s balls he turns into a monster! #suburbancommando9:15 PM Mar 24th

Hulk Hogan is wearing colorful 90′s pants!! #suburban commando9:18 PM Mar 24th

Strange raggie during the ending credits. #suburban commando9:25 PM Mar 24th

Was it worth it? Of course! Over all the movie is a fun, if a badly constructed, comedy. Hulk Hogan can’t act, that is certain, and Christopher Lloyd has never had a lower point in his career. But it features Hulk Hogan playing an arcade machine and believing he was piloting a real ship.

How awesome is that?!

This is also a little conflicted with most of my values and belief about anime as a medium and an art form… but values are easily thrown out the window.

I baked cookies today! I don’t know why I just had the urge to bake. I’m going to try it a few more times. It was enjoyable to start with a munch of ingredients and wind up with a tasty finished project at the end.

I’m also debating if I should just buy Season 4 and the next few after that. I’m consuming them extremely fast and having a great time doing it. But Netflix can be slow… and I’ll probably end up buying them anyway. They really aren’t that expensive. A whole season costs $23 on Amazon. That is about what a movie costs, and an entire Simpsons season provides more than 5X the amount of entertainment.

This probably will never be on DVD

Just thinking about this idioticy makes me shake with rage. I put the first season of the Drew Carey show onto my Netflix queue a while back and now that it has made it to the top I decided to add a few more seasons just to be prepared. Well… they don’t exist. Apparently Warner Brothers decided after releasing the first season in 2007 that it wasn’t profitable to release the rest of the series. So as of right now the Drew Carey Show is not available legally in any form for any amount of money.

Warner is telling its customers to pirate. There are so many methods of getting this content out to the public for little or no cost to the content provider other than formating it correctly. They could put it on Hulu and gain ad money on the customers who watch it with little or no cost to Warner. They could put it on iTunes at a minimal cost. Hell, they could just sign a deal with YouTube and put the content up for streaming to the biggest audience on the Internet. But they haven’t done any of thing. They released one DVD set and decided to give up on maintaining the legacy of a classic show. It’s backwards. It’s abhorrent.

What’s worse is that if I will never want to buy the Season 1 DVD, which is still in print, because I Warner has told me that there is nothing else coming. What is the point to hanging onto one season of a show that ran for nine years?!

Things are getting stressful. I think I need to withdraw from Italian and just rethink my plan for getting my Language requirement completed. If I don’t I fear I may have a complete breakdown. Without Italian my day will be much shorter and my work will be less to stress about. I’m not completely swamped right now but I’m completely stressed for some unknown reason and just looking at a page in a foreign language is nearly enough to cause me to panic. Ugh. I feel so defeated but if I continue at this pace I’ll feel like I’m not being true to myself. And we all know what Polonius said.

So I’ll probably be posting pieces I become obsessed with from time to time. Like today:

Ulysses – Lord Alfred Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,– cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honor’d of them all,–
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,–
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me,–
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads,– you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,–
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

While being obsessed with the poem I stumbled upon a reading of the second half of the final stanza by Sir John Gielgud. UBS ran a series of adds promoting “Ideas that transcend time” which features famous actors reading timeless poems. I was going to do an omnipost that included my favorites from the series but I’ll place the Ulysses reading here.

Saw “The Invention of Lying” today. The first two thirds of the film were very funny. Awkward at times, but the style of awkwardness that Ricky Gervais makes hilarious. The last part of the movie did feel gutted in order to get the happy ending. There were so many better place they could have taken the concept but they finished off with a generic Romantic Comedy style ending. It was especially disappointing because Gervais’ religion satire was unique. In order to really reflex on a piece of our society it’s important to remove it from the context that normally exists in order to make it look ridiculous. “The Invention of Lying” managed to do this to religion and I believe this might have been the first time it was executed so well. Sure Science Fiction and Fantasy have accomplished similar satires on religion but none has achieved the level of ridiculous that Gervais did in this film.

It is definitely worth watching to see a great line up of very funny people (Louis C. K., Tina Faye, Ed Norton, John Hodgman, and others) with the always funny comedy of Rick Gervais.