Quote of the Day

"Today might be the day where everybody throws in the towel," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist for Avalon Partners. "People are saying 'I've had it, I can't take it anymore, I'm selling everything.'"

While I'm far-from-sophisticated about the global markets, and probably keeping my head in the sand, I still feel like this smacks of self-fulfilling (self-defeatist?) prophesy. That said, I'm keeping one eye on the stock ticker all day. (The other'll be on my Kleenex box as I continue to try and shake this tenacious cold.)

Afternoon break

Sweetest hangover, my ass.

Jay will be suspending operations for the duration of Sunday afternoon. All higher functions will be defaulted to Sunday evening as Jay had a little too much to drink after only eating a burrito and some garlic stuffed Olives at Vanessa's LOVELY party.

THE STEWARDESS IS FLYING THE AIRPLANE!

Pure heaven.

Pure heaven is finding out that Netflix is shipping you "Airport 1975" just in time for the weekend...

Now THIS is a trash classic. First off, it's the first sequel to the Arthur Heller inspired potboiler "Airport" and is easily one of the greatest of the 70s Disaster Movies - "Towering Inferno" and "Poisedon Adventure" are probably the other two.

"1975" however has what I feel is the best cast of all these films - yes, better than even Shelley Winters in "Poisedon." and it's mostly due to "Plucky Stewardess" KAREN BLACK, doing her damnedest through crossed eyes to overact and FLY THAT PLANE!

The brief run down is that Dana Andrews (character names don't matter in these flicks, the actors do) crashes his little plane into the cockpit of a 747 --- and, instead of bringing it down just leaves a big honkin' hole in the plane... and conveniently kills the crew. This requires our "plucky stewardess" to fly the plane the best she can while emoting through her crossed eyes. She gets help, though, from Charlton Heston! His "Alan Murdock" (a camp name if there ever was one) is an overly butch pilot who is also also, of course, Karen's Stewardess Plucker.

Anyhow, at one point he's being lowered into a hole in a flying airplane - thanks to George Kennedy (the only person to appear in all 4 "Airport" movies)- to save passengers like Linda Blair, Larry Storch, Sid Ceasar, Gloria Swanson, Norman Fell, Erik Estrada, Jerry Stiller, Helen Reddy, Myrna Loy, Efram Zimbalist Jr, and (the woman who ALWAYS seemed to be the killer whenever she appeared on "Murder, She Wrote") Susan Clark.

I guess the corallary on TV would've been "The Love Boat" beaching up on "Fantasy Island."

You can't make this shit up. Well, someone did. I think they were on some shit when they did. From what I understand it started out as a TV Movie script that caught a lucky break and got inflated up to "Airport" status. Both Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo passed on it. Well, Garbo supposedly passed. I kinda doubt she really considered it. Helen Reddy is a fucking SINGING NUN.

It's also frequently included on any list of "The Worst Films of All Time."

So come over and enjoy, there will be beer for this screening.
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I was hoping to find a nice clip on YouTube of Karen Black and her wild eyes, but wound up encountering something even better. A montage of the film set to the Maxwell cover of Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work." Surprisingly, it works, too.

When Maxwell's at his most falsetto, Karen's shaking pilots and screwing up her Plucky courage to FLY THAT PLANE!





I mean, seriously, come over. There'll be beer.

Darn the office

After a truly terrible day at work - the kind when the half hour you spend rerouted in traffic has you thinking you should just turn around and go home and that's the highlight of the day -and for that matter WHY decide to wait until Monday morning to repave one lane of a busy intersection that I'd really like to turn into you assholes? Can't you see I have places to go? What about my needs? Why didn't I have coffee this morning? Could I have handled it then?
A highlight followed by a full day of people demanding things that you just can't do for them within the 30 second window they'd really really like it in...a day where I actually made a half-assed attempt at meditation and being all "mindful" during lunch (mostly in an effort to get my blood pressure down). When I got home I decided to pop in a DVD and watch a couple episodes of "The Office."

I've only season the first US season, and none of the BBC version (Blasphemer, I know) but I will say that I think it's perfectly fine that people find it to be a very universal experience. My office is JUST as painfully awkward as Dunder-Mifflin... I'd like to think I'm a Jim and not a Dwight... but it sure feels real. Much like the staff at Dunder, I think I'd kill for some cubicle walls just to have a break from the bull-pen.

Truth is, it's so spot on (and I've heard this is even more the case in the Beeb version) that I'm not sure it's funny sometimes. I mean, it's funny but it's also so spot on that you're a little shamed to have to admit you get the joke. We certainly have events of having to sit in painful silence while someone in authority says something that... well, they might think it's funny. We've totally had events like the "Dundie" awards and seminars just as painful as the one they have on "Sexual Harassment."

Is this a good thing? If we all have this incredibly awkward office experience I'd start to wonder what the point of it is. The only one I can come up with is the fact that the Mortgage comes due every 30 days, so something had better be coming in.

Worse off, I think my office has a good smattering of the extra-morbid weirdness of Lars Von Trier's "The Kingdom" (yes, watch me drop the show-off knowledge).

If you haven't seen The Kingdom, check it out. It's pretty marvelous and truly creepy, but if you don't want to listen to Danish and read subtitles, at least get the Stephen King version, "Kingdom Hospital." (Wonderful in it's own way, but a different creature). From the painful tortures of the blow-hard doctor (really, that's probably who I am) to the weirdly knowledgeable employees with Downs Syndrome (they're the heart of the house), I think that oddly doomed vibe applies to my workplace, too. Our daily parking absurdities at work certainly straddles both shows.

Maybe I'll just put up a cat poster and pickled fetus in a jar and have it both ways at work.