Well it’s almost the middle of March so it’s about time for some Brenty Awards. As few of you were even aware of, I didn’t do a formal Brenty Award ceremony last year, I blame the writer’s strike. But this year, you better believe there are some Brenty Awards coming to 11 movies and 3 people. This award show is all about movies and their ability to be awesome. While the shiny stuff like sound mixing, visual effects, and cinematography are great for shows like the Academy Awards, I prefer focusing on those movies that thoroughly entertained me every year listed by genre. Another note is that when I decide on the best picture winner, that movie can not also win the best of it’s genre to increase the amount of movies that win. And as always, I reserve the right to change my mind at any time and change the winner.

Best Animated Movie

This category is often known as the Pixar category because every year since I started handing out the awards when Pixar has had a movie out in that year, it has won (except for Cars, which was kinda disappointing). Here are the previous winners:

2001 – Monsters, Inc.
2002 – Spirited Away
2003 – Finding Nemo
2004 – The Incredibles
2005 – Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
2006 – Monster House

The 2007 nominees are:

Bee Movie
Meet the Robinsons
Ratatouille
The Simpson’s Movie
Surf’s Up

The winner is:

Ratatouille

This was a fairly easy award to give to Ratatouille as it is a very amazing movie. The only hard thing about giving it this award is it was also a personal favorite for best picture and I feel obligated to make a Pixar movie best picture one of these years.

Best Kids/Family Movie

This category is given out to the best movies that are focused towards children and/or families and generally have a rating of G or PG. Here are the previous winners:

2001 – Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
2002 – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
2003 – The Lizzie McGuire Movie
2004 – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
2005 – Sky High
2006 – Nacho Libre

The 2007 nominees are:

Alvin and the Chipmunks
The Bridge to Terabithia
Enchanted
The Last Mimzy
Martian Child

The winner is:

Enchanted

I enjoyed many of these movies and in most cases; I thought they were all going to suck. Enchanted was extremely surprising as it almost played off the Disney stereotypical princess story but yet made it fresh and fun.

Best Comic Book Movie

I am a comic book geek and I love comic book movies. This is the rare time that I actually break away from typical genres and award the best comic book movie of the year. Here are the previous winners:

2003 – X-2: X-Men United
2004 – Spider-Man 2
2005 – Sin City
2006 – V for Vendetta

The 2007 nominees are:

300
Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Ghost Rider
Spider-Man 3
TMNT

The winner is:

300

This was another fairly easy category to award because of the mediocrity of many of these movies. 300 is a very solid movie and Zack Snyder did an excellent job adapting this graphic novel for the big screen.

Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy Movie

This category is where I award the best movie with that suspends my disbelief and transports me to a different world. Here are the previous winners:

2001 – Donnie Darko
2002 – Star Wars: Episode II – The Attack of the Clones
2003 – Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
2004 – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2005 – Serenity
2006 – Pan’s Labyrinth

The 2007 nominees are:

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
I Am Legend
Stardust
Sunshine
Transformers

The winner is:

Transformers

This was one of the hardest genres to give an award to because nothing came out that really knocked my socks off. For the most part, I dug a lot of Transformers and felt in all it’s weakness it was still a really fun movie.

Best Horror Movie

This is obviously where I award the best horror movie of the year. Usually these are the movies that scare the pants off of me the most. Here are the previous winners:

2001 – The Devil’s Backbone
2002 – Signs
2003 – House of 1000 Corpses
2004 – Dawn of the Dead
2005 – Saw II
2006 – SLiTHER

The 2007 nominees are:

1408
28 Weeks Later
Black Sheep
Grindhouse
The Orphanage

The winner is:

The Orphanage

This might be the most controversial Brenty award this year, if there is such a thing because I have yet to see The Orphanage. From my most trusted sources, it’s a movie that I’m going to love but because of it’s limited release, I wasn’t able to catch it in theater’s and it’s not due for a while on DVD. So this award may change, but if I wasn’t confident in this movie’s ability to scare me, I wouldn’t award it the Brenty. I have full faith in The Orphanage.

Best Action/Adventure Movie

This is one of the bigger Brenty Awards handed out, and I’m not sure why it’s done this early but either way here’s the best action/adventure movie of the year. Here are the previous winners:

2001 – Training Day
2002 – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
2003 – Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
2004 – Kill Bill Volume 2
2005 – Batman Begins
2006 – Crank

The 2007 nominees are:

The Bourne Ultimatum
Live Free or Die Hard
Hot Fuzz
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
Rescue Dawn

The winner is:

Hot Fuzz

This was a very close race between The Bourne Ultimatum and Hot Fuzz, both were very solid action movies. But I love me some Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, so that took the advantage over The Bourne Ultimatum, barely.

Best Thriller Movie

This is one of my newer categories that I adjusted for previous years. I really should have handed this out from the beginning, but was too stupid to include. Here are the previous winners:

2001 – Memento
2002 – The Bourne Identity
2003 – Confidence
2004 – The Machinist
2005 – History of Violence
2006 – The Departed

The 2007 nominees are:

Breach
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
Sweeney Todd
Zodiac

The winner is:

No Country for Old Men

This was a very awesome movie and another hardcore contender for best picture of the year. While I haven’t loved everything the Coen Brothers have made, I really got into this movie and was pleased to see it win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Best Romance Movie

This category is given to the best movie that is romantic in tone, which is fairly vague. It can be either the best romantic-drama or romantic-comedy. Here are the previous winners:

2001 – Bridget Jones’ Diary
2002 – Punch-Drunk Love
2003 – American Wedding
2004 – Jersey Girl
2005 – Match Point
2006 – Stranger than Fiction

The 2007 nominees are:

Atonement
Dan in Real Life
Lars and the Real Girl
Music & Lyrics
Once

The winner is:

Once

Once was not only one of the best romantic movies that I’ve seen but also amazing musically. Considering the story behind the movie and the small time frame in which it was shot and the performance of Glen Hansard who never even acted before this movie. This was such a powerful indie movie and definitely deserved to walk away with a Brenty this year, so it got one.

Best Drama Movie

Here are the best movies that are dramas. Not much more to it than that. This is category has very random winners and none of the winners are quite like the others. Here are the previous winners:

2001 – A Beautiful Mind
2002 – Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
2003 – Bend it Like Beckham
2004 – Garden State
2005 – The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
2006 – United 93

The 2007 nominees are:

Gone Baby Gone
The Nanny Diaries
The Nines
Talk to Me
There Will Be Blood

The winner is:

Gone Baby Gone

This award very well could have gone to either There Will Be Blood or Gone Baby Gone. Both definitely deserve to win but one of the criteria for winning is repeated watch-ability. And after watching Gone Baby Gone, I became excited to watch it again. However, in There Will Be Blood I became so drained that seeing it once may be enough for a while. Both are great movies though.

Best Comedy Movie

This is my favorite and usually hardest category to award because comedy is my favorite genre and I see more movies in this genre than any other. Here are the previous winners:

2001 – Freddy Got Fingered
2002 – Super Troopers
2003 – School of Rock
2004 – Napoleon Dynamite
2005 – The Baxter
2006 – Borat

The 2007 nominees are:

Juno
Knocked Up
Superbad
The Ten
Waitress

The winner is:

Waitress

This might be the most shocking win of the night as this category was extremely hard to pick out a winner. I really liked these movies and saw reasonable rational for picking any of them to win, but this was the year of accidental pregnancy comedy movies, and I really feel that Waitress handled this category in the most realistic and funniest. Adrianne Shelly, the writer/director of the movie was murdered shortly before its release and this award is dedicated in her honor. I truly loved Waitress though and in all honestly was the feel good movie of 2007.

Best Picture

Here is the category that you probably skipped all of the other categories to read. As previously stated, the winners of the above categories are not eligible to win this movie. Or in other words, I pick this winner first and then the rest. Here are the previous winners:

2001 – The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring
2002 – Spider-Man
2003 – Love Actually
2004 – Shaun of the Dead
2005 – The 40-Year-Old Virgin
2006 – Children of Men

The 2007 nominees are:

The Bourne Ultimatum
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
Superbad
There Will Be Blood

The winner is:

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

This was an extremely difficult decision to make this year. I literally still don’t know what movie was the best movie that I’ve seen this year. Nothing really stood out this year like it has in other years. So I gave it to King of Kong. This was an extremely wonderful documentary and was fascinating from start to finish. On the surface, a documentary about two guys competing for a high score in a video game does not sound exciting at all. The characters were so gripping, they could have been fictious. Billy Mitchell was right up there with Anton Chigurh and Daniel Plainview as a great villain and Steve Wiebe is right up there with Jason Bourne and John McClane as a great protagonist. I’m fascinated to see what’s going to happen with the Hollywood adaptation of this movie, oh yes, there is actually going to be a scripted version of this coming to theaters at some point. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and a lot of the movies this year. Any of the movies nominated this year could have easily won; they were all good in their own right. The movies that weren’t nominated, I either didn’t see or they were bad, obviously.

Best Actress

Here is one of the few awards I actually award to the people that made their movies good. Here are the previous winners:

2001 – Renee Zellweger for Bridget Jones’ Diary
2002 – Kate Bosworth for Blue Crush
2003 – Mandy Moore for How to Deal
2004 – Natalie Portman for Garden State
2005 – Rachel McAdams for Red Eye
2006 – Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada

The 2007 nominees are:

Amy Adams for Enchanted
Katherine Heigl for Knocked Up
Ellen Page for Juno
Keri Russell for Waitress
Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton

The winner is:

Ellen Page for Juno

While I wasn’t the biggest fan of the script of Juno, Ellen Page was truly fantastic and made my issues with the script less because of her ability to make the character to come to life. Her delivery of the lines was great and will really get a big push from this movie.

Best Actor

Here is another one of the few awards I actually award to the people that made their movies good. Here are the previous winners:

2001 – Denzel Washington for Training Day
2002 – Adam Sandler for Punch-Drunk Love
2003 – Bill Murray for Lost in Translation
2004 – Ben Affleck for Jersey Girl
2005 – Steve Carell for The 40-Year-Old Virgin
2006 – Sacha Baron Cohen for Borat

The 2007 nominees are:

Casey Affleck for Gone Baby Gone
Javier Bardem for No Country for Old Men
George Clooney for Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp for Sweeney Todd

The winner is:

Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood

Do I really need to justify this decision? Daniel Day-Lewis is tremendous and did such an amazing job in this movie. I just can’t say enough good things about Daniel Day-Lewis.

Best Director

Finally, this is the last Brenty Award for 2007. Here are the previous winners:

2001 – Antoine Fuqua for Training Day
2002 – Martin Scorsese for The Gangs of New York
2003 – Peter Jackson for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
2004 – Quentin Tarantino for Kill Bill Vol. 2
2005 – Christopher Nolan for Batman Begins
2006 – Alfonso Cuaron for Children of Men

The 2007 nominees are:

Ben Affleck for Gone Baby Gone
Paul Thomas Anderson for There Will Be Blood
Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men
Tony Gilroy for Michael Clayton
Zack Snyder for 300

The winner is:

Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men

There is just something about the way the Coen Brothers make their movies that make them fantastic. Every movie they make is just so different but at the same time, they do such a wonderful job. No Country for Old Men was a great movie and this is the sort of movie that the Coens can pull off that not many others can.

Hello boys and girls, it's about that time for me to post a new blog entry. Actually that time was probably like 6 months ago, but nevertheless, I had to let the anticipation build and finally when you couldn't take a lack of Brent anymore (1), I rose from the ashes like a phoenix and sprung to life a new blog entry (2). And what better way to write a blog other than on the 27th (3).

So much to talk about, well not really. So I'll just start from a general point and work from there. My summer is going good. It's really weird though because I'm so used to working from like 7AM to like 2PM everyday and falling asleep in my chair sometime before Jon Stewart interviews his nightly guest, to this summer where I'm working from like 4PM to 10:15PM every night, and then not hitting the hay until the next day, usually around 12:27 to 1:00 in the morning. I used to have a lot of time after work to play video games, read comics, and watch movies and TV, that now I spread all of that time into two smaller chunks of time, a bit before work and a bit after. It's kind of nice but it kinda bites. So really, whatever, it doesn't matter so much as I have a pretty good job and it's paying the bills...barely. The worst part is I would average like 40 hours working d/f and have a lot more fun talking with my friends and now I'm working around 30 hours and talking with complete boneheaded customers that I kinda wish would go away. But hey, it could all be worse. (4)

The reason I work less and later is because for the first time in Geidel's Piggly Wiggly history they have their first male cashier, me. And I gotta admit, it's kinda weird, but at the same time, kinda fun too. Normally, I just work the lanes and stuff, but tonight actually was the first time I had to work in the office by myself, and it went really good. I actually really like checking there. But then again, I've pretty much enjoyed every job I've ever done there. That business is great and has treated me right for 7 long years. And while as a cashier, I've made tons of new friends (5), I barely get to see all the people that I used to see in the day time, but it's all good.

Speaking of which (6), I celebrated my birthday about a week and a half ago. And I have to say it was pretty good. Julie came up and visited which made it really really awesome. And she brought me presents which was even better, jk. She bought me Mario Party 8 and The Office Season 2, and also made me the most thoughtful gift I ever received entitled "27 Things I Love About My Brenty Boy" and it was a list of 27 things, well you can figure it out. It was really sweet and was definitely a very unexpected and awesome surprise. And it really made gift giving that much harder for her, because I really need to step up my game at least a little bit. The next day wasn't so great though because after sleeping on the floor(7) and for a while on a hanger(8), I woke up with an awful migraine headache. I laid down on the couch for a while after getting up, but within minutes ran to the bathroom to get rid of the night before's chili cheese dog. I vomited one other time that morning. But felt fine a couple of hours later and bid my wonderful girlfriend a fond farewell for a couple of weeks.

So what else has been happening, well not that much. I, of course, have been playing some Nintendo Wii. I've been playing the aforementioned Mario Party 8 scarcely, mostly because it's more fun to play with other people and I don't have anyone to play it with right now. But later, I will play through it some more and unlock some more goodies. I also got on a hardcore Zelda kick there for a while and made it about halfway through the third dungeon before turning that game off for a brief break. I'm really digging it though, and wish I had more time to play it. Mostly it's not being played because I bought Resident Evil 4 for the Wii and I have to say this game is rocking my socks off. I've run into a few things I don't like about it(9) but it's really a hoot. I have two other Resident Evil games for the PS2 and Gamecube and I suck at them, bad, but this one just feels right, and I'm actually able to shoot and move and play it pretty well.

The big reason my Wii has been a little wiiglected these past two weeks is I've taken up reading. And shockingly enough, I'm not just reading skinny 32 page picture books, but instead 870 page volumes of Harry Potter goodness. That's right I actually read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, my first Harry Potter reading adventure before seeing the movie. One of the reasons, was because I was really disappointed in the storytelling aspect of the 4th movie as I felt a lot of the details that make the Harry Potter universe so great were not explained in the movie. It was really my least favorite of the movies because I felt like it was like the sparknotes version of the books instead of the story brought to you on the big screen. So I'm going into this adventure fully prepared. I've also started reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I should have finished by the beginning of next week due to my crazy work schedule the rest of this week. And then I will be completely ready to score on the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on July 21 (10), and hopefully get that book read before I see the spoilers for it, which knowing me and my curiosity level, will be extremely hard to avoid.

I haven't completely neglected comics though because I am getting a lot of comic book reading done at Piggly Wiggly, when I'm out working the registers on really boring nights. I started off this summer with over 100 books on my to read pile and have gotten it down to 70 at this point, but with the progress I'm making, by the end of summer I should be totally caught up.

While I've been a reading machine, my movie count has really suffered bad. I'm only at 57 movies for the year. But it's a lot cheaper this way, and I don't really mind not seeing crap like Delta Farce and Norbit, so in reality I can't complain too much.

I also really haven't been watching that much TV, except for of course, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien every weeknight. I've been watching The Loop, it's a pretty decent sitcom, much better then every other sitcom on FOX post-Arrested Development. I watched The Sopranos season finale and I might as well chime in on all the controversy. I thought the ending was really disappointing at first because I at least wanted to see a gun or something go to Tony's head before it faded to black, but overall, I don't mind a semi-cliff hanger of an ending. The thing with shows like The Sopranos, Buffy, Angel, Veronica Mars, etc. is that they create such rich worlds, that the series can never truly end, because you'll always wonder what ends up happening to these characters you grow and love over several years. Every TV series ending is a cliffhanger, whether it's obvious or not. I thought the environment set up in that final few minutes of the Sopranos episode was great though. I was sitting on the edge of my seat and that was truly the most gripping onion ring eating action I've ever witnessed. As my eyes were glued to the screen, and the TV faded to black I immediately thought something went wrong with the signal on my cable or something only to find out that it was how the episode ended. I still really liked it though. And give David Chase credit, because he created an ending that people were talking about for week's later. That's something that is really hard to do. Everybody was talking about it. You don't see many people talking about the ending of Pirates 3 even. Like that kind of publicity is hard to find, especially for a cable TV show, so good for you.

And I don't think this blog would be complete without me talking for a couple of minutes about the Chris Benoit incident (11). Quite frankly, I am shocked an appalled at the events that took place. Being a wrestling fan, especially for the duration that I've enjoyed the sport, brings you a certain closeness with the personas you see on TV. You feel for these people when things happen to them outside of the ring. That's really something hard to find. Because like when baseball players die, there isn't a huge emotional reaction that baseball fans feel. But yet, when a wrestler dies, something that happens far too often, it really gets you from the bottom of your heart. It feels like a relative or someone based away. I don't know if seeing them in the ring on a weekly basis for 10, 15, 20 years does this to you or what. But I was heart broken when I found out Chris Benoit died, because quite frankly that sort of thing shouldn't happen to someone that I admired for his wrestling ability as much as him. But then when I found out that for some reason or another, he murdered his wife and child, it felt like I've been betrayed. I don't know why this happened, but I'm sure there's more then "roid rage" like the stupid f'n media wants you to think. I really wish the media would stay out of it because their speculative talk and antisemitism towards pro wresltling and it's fans is appalling. Granted, sometimes they are correct but mostly they discuss wrestling fans as being a lower breed of people and wrestlers as being non-athletic because wrestling is "fake." It's bullshit, wrestling is way more hardcore on an athlete's body then any of the "real" sports out there. And granted, I hardly watch wrestling anymore, but still keep up semi-regularly on the news, does that make me some kind of imbred idiot or something? Because that's what that dickhead on AM620 sounded like when he was discussing wrestling. And trust me, if/when the details come out, I'm sure it's going to be a lot more complicated then roid rage, like these idiots think it is. Whether it's anti-depressants, or some mixture of medications, or some other weird chemical reaction that occured. There's something not right about why this happened, and hopefully the truth comes out soon.

Of course, there's always more I could type, but I should stop. So yeah, hopefully you enjoyed and if you did post some comments or something because I'm more likely to post more shit if you leave some kind words.

Strassburg out.






Footnotes

(1) Or completely forgotten that he existed.

(2) At this point, it's already clearly too obvious I've read too much Harry Potter this past week.

(3) As you may or may not know, 27 is my favorite number as that being the fact, I always tried to make an extra special blog-a-palooza on the 27th of every month back when I was daily blog entries.

(4) I had to step away from the computer for 7 hours after this paragraph to change into my work clothes and work from 3:00 until 10 something.

(5) Ok, maybe just a couple, but still.

(6) Speaking of which? How is that a speaking of which? *2 bonus points for anyone who gets that* *Anthony excluded*

(7) Julie was sleeping in my extremely small bed.

(8) I still have no idea how I slept several hours on top of a plastic hanger and didn't notice.

(9) Mostly just the lack of ammunition because I wish I could kill more of those stupid ganados, but I spend too much time shooting them and eventually run out of bullets completely.

(10) My second midnight wiilease ever, allthough I really doubt it will top the awesomeness of getting a Wii.

(11) If you don't know what happened Google it.

So yeah, it has been a while. A long while. Far too long since I last jotted done some useless ramblings in this here LiveJournalmabober. I've been busy. I know that's really not an excuse since everyone is busy, but at the same time, I guess I just had my mind occupied in other areas. Better areas. As you're probably already aware of, I have a girlfriend. And honestly, I'm still in disbelief some days. Maybe I shouldn't be, but at the same time, I thought I would be waiting for several more years before finally entering the "I Have A Girlfriend Club," if even by then. She's amazing. I can't say enough good things about her. But for the first time in my life, I'm actually happy, like we're talking 5 out of 5 happy. As opposed to my normal 3 out of 5 on the happiness scale.

So yeah, what else is new in the life of Brent, you may be pondering. Honestly, not a whole lot to report. Spring break was really nice. It was great to be home for a week and hang out with Anthony and see the parents again. Not only that but seeing everyone else around Kewaskum, more specifically Piggly Wiggly. Piggly Wiggly is one of those places that I feel like I can always go back to and spend hours on end just talking to everyone around the store. It's really nice to feel liked by a bunch of people and see their interest in your life even though you're not a part of there's much. That store will always hold a special place in my heart.

After spending six days at home, I drove down to Beloit to visit Julie and meet her family. That was a really great caper to a pretty great spring break. Her parents are really nice and very good people. They made me feel a sense of comfort as soon as I walked in the door and even though I really should have been nervous, they made me feel welcome and not so bad. Julie's sisters Pam and Paige were really cool and crazy, but they were a lot of fun as well. It was really nice visiting them and I look forward to coming down again sometime in the near future. There's a chance if everything goes well that I could go down for Easter weekend, unless Target schedules me a bunch of hours that I can't talk Justin and/or Dan into taking. We'll see, but I would really look forward to visiting again.

Enough with the positivity for a second though. Life is good and all, but I feel that this blog entry wouldn't be complete without an obligatory rant. And I guess the main thing pissing me off is Julie's roommate/best friend Amy. Granted this is one of the few people in the world that I don't want to be enemies with, but it's complicated. And it's not like I'm being a dick to her or anything, I try to be nice and always say hi, but she always responds with some sort of snooty monosyllabic response and just shows general disinterest in my being there. I guess I'm just perplexed as to why she hates me. At the same time, she has those same moments with Julie sometimes, but usually breaks out of it with her. And like for the last week she has been nothing but a bitch towards me. I don't know, I try not to let it bother me and I know I should be happy because I've got a great girlfriend but it's hard when it seems like Amy might be wanting to sabotage Julie and my happiness just because she's going through some bad stuff.

And on that note, Julie just had her 21st birthday on Wednesday. And while Julie has stated numerous times her displeasure towards Amy's notions of going out and getting drunk, Amy keeps pushing not getting the point through her head. And just to be clear about this topic, I guess I don't care if Julie goes out, has fun, and gets a drink or whatever. Because as you all are aware, I don't drink. Haven't ever. Will never. I've been tempted by the devil. But I just have never wanted to. I don't really see the bloody point in drinking. Sure, you get durnk, throw up, have a massive headache the next day. Sounds like something I want to do. Now I'm not saying having a drink will cause said events, but at the same time when I think drinking, or really anything for that matter, I think of the side effects. I cause I'm over cautious like that. But when it boils right down to it. I've made my decision about this subject. Heck, I actually told myself when I was 10 that I wasn't going to drink, smoke, or do drugs. This wasn't something that my parents said to me. The DARE program at school had no effect on my decision. This was something I decided at an early age not to do, because I didn't see any benefits from it. Granted my parents didn't drink hardly ever. They might at family gatherings and occasionally at home would have a bloody mary or something. But I didn't even want to make casual drinking a choice. I guess I've seen the impact of drinking on people. I've looked at my Uncle Mark's history. He used to be an alcoholic and got over it, married my aunt Pam and is a great guy. His life got better after he stopped drinking. Meanwhile, I look at the rest of my relatives and I just see a bunch of bloody alcoholics. Granted they get through life fine, but when I look at them, they are not who I want to be. The benefits of drinking just never seemed to be there for me, sure it might be fun (or whatever) but it just never appealed to me. The truth be told, I probably could have been popular in high school had I chose to drink. I became friends with many of the "cool" people in school. But while I was friends with them in class or at work, I never hung around with them outside of school, because like so many "cool" high school kids, they spent their free time drinking. I was their geeky friend. But in a way, I think that I was the guy they wished they could be more of. I was myself, hell I still am. I've never changed anything about myself to fit into a group. I've never given in to peer pressure. All of my dumb choices, I made myself. All of the smart choices, I made myself. I'm not afraid to say no when someone wants to do something that I don't want to do. Granted I might be a little coy and act like I'm sorry I didn't do it for them. But in reality, I'm not that bad of an actor.

Sometimes you have to be firm though and make your intentions well known. In third, fourth, and fifth grades, I was one of the kings of the elementary school. I hung out with Dan Schneider, who was the pinnacle of awesomeness at that age. It was a lot of fun being the top dog on the totem pole at an early age. I was extremely outgoing, hyper, and not afraid to stand up in front of a large group of people and do something stupid. Pretty much the complete opposite of what you see before you today. In sixth grade, something happened. See in Kewaskum, when going to middle school you not only go there with the people you went to elementary school with, but also two other, smaller elementary schools out in the country. Because of this Dan's popular level rose and he became friends with the "cool" people from the other schools. Our lunch table soon became crowded. We were limited to 16 students at the table, while we were trying to fit 18 to 20 on a daily basis. One day the lunch aides wouldn't take our cramp seating arrangement and wanted only 16 students at the table. We had 17 at the time. Now, I grew to a point where Dan was my best friend but he started ignoring me more and more to hang out with his other friends. That day, I made a decision. A decision that would change the course of my life forever. When the aid asked for a student to move and no one would, even though they were the new kids to our clique. I got up and moved. Dan said, "No, Brent don't move. Someone else go..." No one was volunteering and I proceeded to sit by myself on the table next to the popular kids. Sadly, that became a metaphor for the rest of my life. I was already alone at home being the only child, now I was alone at school. And for some reason, a radical shift began happening in my life. Instead of being outgoing and carefree in school, I became quiet and scared. Sure, I would go on to make numerous other friends and instead of being a follower in the popular group, I became a leader of the rejects. I wish I could be that same outgoing, carefree individual I was back in the day, because quite frankly, he's a lot more entertaining than the schmuck that is typing this blog today. Things haven't turned out that bad.

I think that'll wrap up this blog entry. Take care anyone who bothered spending their time reading this.

-Brent

Some students may consider the perfect winter break spent in a nice, sunny, and warm place where they can sit back all day while drinking pina coladas and getting caught in the rain(1). Meanwhile, this break has been about as perfect as possible to this point for me(2). I've been working enough to keep me busy and keep my bank account growing but at the same time able to have enough time off that I don't feel I've wasted my entire day at work. I'm doing enough at work to accomplish my goals for the day but at the same time not really wearing myself down so that when I come home I want to go to sleep right away. And post-work, I've been able to catch a couple of flicks at the Budget, watch some DVDs, and have spent way too much time playing video games. And let me tell you, it's been totally steak sauce(3).

I've been maintaining a solid rotation of the new Zelda game for the Wii, Guitar Hero II, and Super Mario Bros.. And all of them are completely glorious games in completely different ways and they all make for a completely awesome night of gaming. At the Budget, I've seen Turistas, Man of the Year and Marie Antoinette. Three completely different movies, as well. Turistas was a big fat piece of turd. Man of the Year was better than it should have been but still wasn't all that impressive. I kind of liked Marie Antoinette because I always feel like Sofia Coppola brings something different to the table when you're watching one of her movies, but at the same time completely understand why it was booed at Cannes. And on the DVD side, I've been watching a lot of Seinfeld (best sitcom ever?(4)), My Name is Earl, and tonight I watched What a Girl Wants.

I have made up my mind on what I'm going to do the night of New Year's Eve. First of all, I work until around 10, which pretty much sucks. But after that, I'm going have the most kick ass New Year's Wiive celebration this side of Barton. I'm probably going to play some Wii Sports because that will help with one of my New Year's Resolutions of staying in shape, whoops I mean playing a shit-ton of video games. It should be a great night of drinking a can of Mountain Dew, playing video games, switching over momentarily to watch Carson Daly's balls drop(5), watch an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and fall asleep at roughly 12:47. Happy freakin' New Year.

But seriously, I've got that feeling in my butt that 2007 is going to be a kick ass year. Besides playing a shit-ton more video games (which I've already started now), being more productive in life in general (which includes the fine art of DVD watching), I'm also going to spend more time watching Buffy, Angel, and Firefly because quite frankly I haven't spent nearly enough time watching the three best shows on Earth recently. I think the last time I completed a season was like a year and a half ago, and that must change. Also, I want to read more. I've got a huge ass pile of comics and a smaller but still large pile of books that are waiting to be consumed by my eyeballs. Whether it's a comic book or a chapter of an actual book , I want to get some actual reading done before I go to sleep at night. Also, I want to continue my bad ass streak of seeing a movie in a theater every week, which right now is at 44 weeks in a row. I think those are some pretty lofty goals and should help me maintain my spot as one of the most awesome people ever.

Well, I think I'm going to digest a comic book and hit the hay. Also, I am officially coming home next Tuesday night through Saturday morning, so be ready Kewaskum.

-Brent

(1) Yes, this is referring to the song.

(2) That's a lot of p's.

(3) In other words: A1. First-class, excellent.

(4) Yes.

(5) I absolutely love the first season of The O.C.

Can't sleep, so I figured I would go back to my roots for the inevitable blog/note/livejournal update of my life. Things have certainly been far from bad these last couple of months and besides little things like some of the articles in the school newspaper(1), I've lead a fairly stress-free life up in Green Bay this semester. Probably too stress-free to be honest. I haven't been keeping up much with homework and have been even more horrible than ever when it comes to procrastinating, but I'm having fun and I'll certainly take that any day over being productive. Well, at least almost any day.

Damn my first footnote is long.

I sincerely hate talking about my personal life, but find it oddly compelling to write about it. So I apologize in advance and feel free to skip to the next paragraph if this sort of thing bores you, I won't blame you (it bores me too). When it comes to personal stuff, there really isn't much to say (told you it's boring). After careful thought and deliberation, I've decided to continue playing things safe and let things happen around me instead of being the one trying to initiate a change. And while things will happen around me, things are not happening to me. That's probably for the best right now because in that Dante Hicks-esque way, I still fear change. I have a whole blog entry in mind, that I want to type hopefully sometime after exams and before Christmas that could push the blog entries in my heyday out of the spotlight of being the best stuff I've typed for public consumption. I don't have the time or the mental capacity to dip into that stuff right now.And I go into an area that hardly anyone reading this knows about and I've never even come close to writing about before.

My jobs are driving me insane. I'm getting additional responsibilities at school, which wouldn't be so bad if I could do it after my normal shift, but because the Financial Services Coordinator uses the office, I have to find time that she's not in there and that another person that uses that office isn't there. So I'm going to wind up going to work a half-hour earlier just in the chances that I can get up there and get some work done after my shift and before other people show up. Target isn't bad, and I'm getting to work in electronics gradually more than I did last go around. Electronics is the one department I work there that makes me actually want to help people to either show off my knowledge (video games, DVDs) or to learn some new things while trying to explain to them how it works (digital cameras). It's also really fun bad mouthing the Playstation 3 and Zune and getting paid for it at the same time. And it's even more fun spending twenty minutes talking to people about how awesome the Wii is. Too bad I don't get put over there regularly, but I fear that I overfill the awesomeness bar that is normally in electronics and instead they make me do mediocre work in market or pretty good work in toys. I can't wait for Christmas to be over however. Just because I can't stand people complaining about how we never have Wiis in. If you really fucking wanted a Wii, everyone had an opportunity to get one on Sunday, November 19. If you didn't do the time on that day, you must not have wanted one badly enough, and even though Nintendo is still shipping out units it's hard to meet the extremely high worldwide demand of the product, but yet soccer moms don't seem to understand that sort of stuff.

In additional news, I really want to come home. While Green Bay has been anything from bad, I'm seriously missing the people at the Pig, hanging out at Anton's/Tim's place, and spending time with my parents. I don't know how much I'm going to be home during winter break, but I'm hoping I can make a trip home for at least a day and a half for Christmas and maybe get home for a Wiikend before the end of break, even if that means I have to take off. Looking back, I probably should have seen what I could have gotten hours-wise at the Pig, so I could spend the break in my basement while getting some good hours at the store, but with Anthony's whole big mess, I didn't know what was going on and didn't want to get stuck in a hostile work environment or working for some new dickfor(2) that would have taken over for Anthony.

Holy shit, I type a lot.

Fin.

-Brent

(1) The reason I bring up the school newspaper, is two-fold first of all I can't pick up that thing without wanting to strangle the writer of an article. Whether they're talking smack about a good movie or talking trash about a good movie, there's always enough to drive me into rantville. Like in the last paper, they wasted half a page talking about "how awesome" the PS3 is. Sh'yeah right, first of all it was a horribly written article and I could point out a ton of inaccuracies, like the price points, number or units shipped, and "quality" of games. Then the paper insisted on calling me a nerd by mentioning that only uber-nerds would know who characters like Luke Cage, Spider-Woman and Miss Marvel were when he was reviewing a fucking comic book video game. Dude, you should at least be familiar with the subject material before starting to insult people for your lack of knowledge about an article that you chose to write. Maybe you should pick up some comics and experience these characters first hand instead of acting like a comic book fan because you've watched a couple of fucking movies. Hell, all you'll have to pick up is New Avengers and Astonishing X-Men and you'll know pretty much every character in the game. Plus, if you wanted to get on to something real nerdy, it would be geeking out when you pick a team consisting of Iron Man, Captain America, Luke Cage, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, and/or Miss Marvel and the game voice saying "NEW AVENGERS!" That's when you've entered into geek country, not by knowing who they are.

The other reason I mention the newspaper is because in last week's paper some quotage by yours truly graced the front page, where I spent some time talking about volunteering at school, which quite frankly I don't do much of. But I probably will help out with the VITA thing I mentioned. Thanks Jake for giving me the hook-up and in a weird way making me want to write more.

(2) What's a dickfor?

I figured it was aboot time to write another blog and even though I really need to get some sleep because I haven't been doing that much the past few days, I figured I would alert everyone as to my current situation.

Sunday night, I went to Madison to see Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black perform some stand-up comedy. The show was hi-lari-ous and it was cool getting some autographs and a picture with the dudes after the show. Afterwards, I had a genius fucking (1) idea to stop at the McDonald's drive thru to grab some late night grubbage. After driving to the drive-thru, heading off to the drive-thru, approaching the drive-thru, getting close to the drive-thru, almost there at the drive-thru, now we're there at the drive-thru, there in line at the drive-thru, did I mention the drive-thru...drive-thru...drive-thru (2), I paid the nice lady and received the food. Well, apparently, instead of putting my wallet back in my ass pocket, I decided to put it on my lap. A few seconds later, not realizing said wallet was still on lap, I got out of my motor vehicle to throw a can of soda away and boom goes the dynamite and my wallet hits the pavement of the McDonald's parking lot. Well, apparently the dynamite didn't go boom because even my fox-like ears couldn't pick up the sound of leather hitting concrete because I hadn't noticed that my wallet was missing until I was taking a leak at home. I put my hand in my pocket, oh my God there's no wallet. (3)

After realizing that my wallet was gone, I searched my car frantically nearly ripping the seats out in hope that somewhere my wallet could be found, but after searching high and low and the trunk (why I don't know), the wallet was nowhere to be found. At that point, the thought had already crossed my mind that it was sitting in that McDonald's parking lot. So I called the dining establishment and didn't get a response, I called a few minutes later and the same person that took my order at the restaurant answered the phone. Immediatley, I knew I was in trouble. Not to say anything bad about people who come up from their country speaking spanish and hardly know English, but when you're searching desperatley for your holder of money, you want to speak to someone that understands the words that are coming out of your mouth.(4) She said that she couldn't leave the restaurant to look for my wallet. By then, I had already talked to my parents and was planning on driving the hour and a halfish back to Madison to search that gorram parking lot for my wallet. Keep in mind by the time we left the driveway heading to Madison it was 1am.

After driving to Madison, we searched through the parking lot and found nothing. The lady at the drive-thru said that no one turned it in and after searching the nearby grassy areas, we gave up hope. Got back home around 5am, and I spent the next 30 minutes in bed thinking about how fucked I was. I got about 2 hours of sleep before I woke up so that I could begin the day going around West Bend and getting a new driver's license, social security card (yes, it was in my wallet, but only because I needed it for Orientation at Target this week, please please please never put your social security card in your wallet, take it from me), going to the police station, and calling all the credit card places. Well, right after taking my shower in the morning, I got a call from my credit card company saying they suspected my card has been used fraudently and was used at several gas stations around Madison before they deactivated it. At this point, I truly knew I was fucked big time. The fine feller on the phone said that he would make sure that the credit card was totally de-activated and they would send me a new one, thank goodness. I then contacted my bank up in Green Bay about my debit card and they reported that the card was used as well and they had also shut down service on it. At this point, as much as I was frustrated at my dumb self for losing the card, I was 27 times more pissed at the motherfucker that found my wallet and started using it for his own fucking use. Seriously, what kind of dirty piece of shit does something like that. Take the $50 I had in there, that's fucking fine, I would have been cool with that, but to use another man's credit cards, that shit is just fucking low. I can only hope at this point that piece of shit found my wallet, grabbed the credit cards and cash and threw the thing in a garbage somewhere because if they kept the entire thing, I'm basically fucked financially for the rest of my life considering they can get credit cards whenever they want to with my information.

Initially, I thought maybe the charges wouldn't go through my bank account and they hadn't until later in the day on Tuesday when I noticed two charges for $75 and $66 had been used at Madison gas stations. And because I'm a broke ass college student, that was more money then I had in my account, so now I'm in the red. So now I'm going to have to spend a majority of my free time at the bank tomorrow filling out forms making sure that the charges those fuckers made are put back into my account so I actually have a positive balance in my account. And then, I have to call the credit card company and see how much they charged up over there, and find out how I can get that cleared up. And in the meantime, I've got to pray that the Madison police send me a report to fill out so, and then when I fill it out, actually try to find these fuckstains that took my shit. I hope these motherfuckers rot in hell for what they've done and I swear if they get arrested and I have to testify, I'm not going to make it more then 30 seconds in the courtroom without kicking their fucking asses.

I wish there was an easier way of getting through this shit, like I don't understand why they can't just send a new social security number out, sure it would complicate things for taxes, school, etc. for a year or two but it would be a lot better than having to worry for the rest of your life that someone out there has your information and could use the shit whenever they feel like just to fuck you over again.

And of course, I had an exam scheduled for Monday afternoon, luckily the professor understood my situation and gave permission to take it today. Of course, even though I studied really hard for it, I still fucked it up pretty bad. Because, it's really hard to keep your mind on the exciting world of financial error correction and the percentage-completion method when a lot more important shit is going on in life.

To make a long story short, never go through the fucking drive-thru. And constantly check your ass (or purse, I guess) for your wallet. And definitley don't carry your social security card around with you.

Have to get up in a few hours for work, and of course the combinations for the safes were in my wallet too. So I have to wake up my boss and have her tell me the combinations so that I can do my job. I'm sure she's going to be thrilled with that news. Fuck. I'm done.

-Brent Strassburg aka Hector Fernandez-Valenzula-Zimbabwe-Martinez or whoever the fuck found my wallet.

(1) Yes, the footnotes are back. And even though these are posted at the end of the document, I would like to apologize for the massive amounts of profanity that are uttered in this blog entry, but fuck it.

(2) This was obviously a reference to Weird Al's song "Trapped in the Drive-Thru" which is a parody of R. Kelly's epic Hip-Hopera "Trapped in the Closet."

(3) Another reference to "Trapped in the Drive-Thru, it's truly ironic the parallels between that night and that song.

(4) Rush Hour bitch. Yeah, I went there.

So far my first week on campus has been glorious. That could be a little overstatement but compared to the first year I spent here everything is exponentially better. On the first day in my new apartment I spent more time socializing with my roommates than I did all of last year and in the first week, have spent more time out of my room and socializing with people on campus. It's really been an unexpected and tasty treat, nearly as tasty as the Frosty's were during the Frosty run last night. "I tried making them at home but they just weren't the same. (1)"

In other news, I'm kind of having doubts about my major again. I really don't mind accounting and like the numbers and stuff, but I just don't find doing the work all that interesting. I tried on several occasions this weekend to get some of it done but always end up on You Tube watching videos or going by the neighbors to watch Mel Brooks movies. Speaking of which, I finally watched Young Frankenstein for the first time this weekend, and it was frickin' brilliant. But any hoot, I guess I'd find doing something in the writing field more interesting. Of course, the ultimate dream would be doing movie reviews or going into a more creative field of writing movies or television shows. So I'm not really sure anymore. Since James Gunn, (writer of such great movies as SLiTHER, Dawn of the Dead (2004), Scooby-Doo) said the best way to work on your writing is to sit down and do that, I would type out a blog entry. Can't hurt any. I guess I'll go through this semester and try my hardest in the accounting field and then maybe go the more creative route next semester if I'm not happy. I did well in my writing classes at UWWC when it came to the creative stuff, I didn't do that well on writing stuff that has happened in my personal life because quite frankly, I didn't have much to write about. My papers on "steroids and sports" and "internet piracy" both got good grades, so I'm sure their could be some sort of low paying future in it for me but then I'd have to give up the almost guaranteed noticeable chunk of change that you get paid for doing the number crunching in a cubicle.

Other wise, things are peachy keen. James is a phenomenal roommate and very inviting when it comes to hanging out with his friends. I met a lot of awesome people through him including the fine folks that live on the other side of the wall and his girlfriend and her gang. Dan has been really cool and it's nice to have someone to sit around and wax philosophically over the over sequelization of Hollywood and Snakes on a Plane. Michael, the guy I'm sharing a room with is basically what I wanted in a stranger that I have to share a room with. He's a fellow accounting student and transfer student and we are in two classes together which means a "study buddy (2)." Another nice thing from my semi-selficous vantage point, is he goes home weekends to work and be with his girlfriend, which means that I have the room to myself so I can have all the sexy parties that I want and can even stay up all night if I want to. The only thing that sucks about the apartment is whenever I'm by the computer there seems to be a fly buzzing around my head at all times. Granted this occurrence could happen at any place but that seems to be the only negative thing I can think of at this time.

One other bit of fun news is that I'm getting a new cellular telephone communication device this weekend. It looks extremely shiny and features the "autograph of the 21st century (3)" mode. It will also feature a screen that will actually be able to be seen when there are lights present. I will have the same number so for those of you who never call me, you can still not call me at the same number.

Well, I've got about an hour before class and some homework to do for it, so I'm going to watch Gilmore Girls and think about doing homework. That's almost as good as doing it, right?

Footnotes
(1) Mr. Deeds reference
(2) Said in my best Alyson Hannigan voice from Buffy.
(3) Referencing Summer in The O.C. who said that camera phones are the autographs of the 21st Century.

After several months of waiting, I finally was able to edit and complete the documentary I shot at a Piggly Wiggly employee Milwaukee Brewers game.

I got it cut down to exactly five minutes, so if you can spare that much of your day to check it out, that would be awesome. You can view it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSOootOJp4o or by visiting my MySpace page and watching the first video.

I hope this is the first of many good things coming out from Lower Your Expectations Productions (which is the official name of my production offices).

Thanks!

Holy fucking Moses! Another year of school done with and a very exciting summer is on the way. I'm seriously going to cherish this summer more than I ever have. It's been an extremely difficult and quite frankly a really fucking lonely 8 months. And while I really want to see She's The Man and ATL (Larry The Cable Guy's flick starts too, but fuck that shit) at the Budget Theater this weekend, I'm not going to mind being in the basement playing Guitar Hero on a 27-inch TV, that's for damn sure.

I figured since I've officially taken my last exam, this would be a good time to start writing some jibba-jabba, since I don't watch anything on Wednesday nights anyway. Well, I was going to watch the streaming episode of LOST on ABC.com, like I did for the recap, but the schools internet licks so much testicles that the video wouldn't load because the connection is too slow. I'm certainly not going to miss this Internet connection, that's for damn sure. Seriously, it's like dial-up speeds for T1 housing charges, it's great. I don't get why they don't just give everyone a Roadrunner line in their dorm since they have a deal with Time Warner for the TV.

This week has been pretty fun though. Granted the studying has licked balls, but I've taken the studying time to work on my multitasking skills by listening to podcasts while studying. Which basically means that I've been listening to podcasts on my iPod, even though I'm right by my computer, and my books are laying open on the floor while I look up the latest announcements from E3. Lots of This Week in Tech and This Week in Media so I can find out more information about those great little technological devices that make life so easy yet I couldn't afford without selling vital organs on the black market. I also have the complete collection of The Ricky Gervais Show radio broadcasts from 2001-2005 on my computer and I've been easily going through about 2 of those a day. That is some of the most entertaining stuff on the planet.

Back to this summer though, it's going to be fun. I'll be in a softball team that plays every Thursday night. From the sounds of things thus far, I'm going to be assistant manager and catcher. And it sounds like Anthony is going to have Video Gameapalooza at his place on Wednesdays, which will also be the day we do our infamous Cohen runs. So Wednesdays are going to be the kick. I should have more limited weekend hours, which is great. I'll actually be able to get out and do stuff instead of working 8 hours every Saturday. I should still be around 40 hours during the week at the Pig too, which will help give the school more money.

I know you're dieing to know what I've done since I've last updated you about my where-abouts. Last Thursday was a pretty legendary day. I got to eat some free pizza, unfortintley not nearly enough though, at the ASA End of the Year social and afterwards, I went to the Mercury 1 Wrestling show in Green Bay, where the best up and coming wrestler in the business today, Samoa Joe was going to be performing. During the intermission of the show, I plunked down some green, and was able to climb in the ring and get a picture with Joe, which you can see at my MySpace page or Facebook page. Needless to say, he absolutely tore it up in the ring and it was great to be in the front row for one of his matches.

Since I pretty much stopped watching wrestling in 2003, I decided with the recent announcement of ECW making it's return and with TNA putting on great events all the time, I would start watching it again. So I watched Raw last week (which is where I found out about the Samoa Joe thing) and it's been almost total non-stop wrestling since then. I watched almost an entire ECW PPV after Raw, watched a couple of Samoa Joe matches via YouTube and then Saturday night I watched 6 and a half hours of Velocity and Heat online because I really didn't have anything else to do. Professional wrestling has once again invaded my soul and it's good to be back.

Speaking of getting stinkfisted, the school bookstore has once again invaded my asshole. After plunking down a cool $500 for four books, I got a whoping $110 back. Granted I kept one of my books because it's THE only accounting textbook I'll ever need according to my accounting teacher. Also, the school had no use for my Business Law textbook, which I only used once the entire semester. The teacher announced after I bought my book, that none of the exam questions would come from the book but would instead come from his lectures. I only used it once for one case problem and now I'll get to lug the damn thing around with me for the rest of my life. Thanks bookstore!

Back to Comics. I really like the new Civil War mini-series that Marvel is putting out. It's written by one of the best in the business, Mark Millar. And it's an extremely well done book and even if you don't read any comics, it's one that you can pick up and understand without 700 crossover books to explain the rest of the story. Also, DC Comics had a brilliant idea with it's All Star line. Get together an all star writer and artist, pair them up with a great character and it will be comic book gold.... if it ever comes out. Frank Miller and Jim Lee teamed together to release All Star Batman and Robin, with the first issue coming out last July. We're in May and issue 4 is just about to hit shelves next week, if it doesn't get pushed back yet again. I'm kind of wishing that they would have required Frank Miller to turn in all the scripts before attacking this project because waiting 4 months inbetween comics is extremely annoying.

Well, I'm tired of typing and I'm sure you're tired of reading my drivel, so I'm going to end this now and start reading some comics and maybe watch a movie. Probably Sin City, that is unless my computer turns into Frank Miller and becomes too lazy to show it. I'm out.

Good morning boys and girls and I think I've finally awoken from my stagnant situation into my more usual chatty Kathy routine again. So, I apologize beforehand for filling your friends page up with stuff, but hope that it will be a good read. (I'm not going to type everyday, so don't be concerned.)

Here's a few of the things I've been thinking about recently:

Political Stuff, But Important Political Stuff

If you haven't heard of the Net Neutrality thing going around the Internet check this out. It's a video detailing exactly what could happen if something isn't done about this now. Granted I'm not a highly political guy, but in the same respect I think there shouldn't be any restrictions on something like the Internet. To think that ISPs, which you pay a shitload of money to every month for internet access, can control what you do with that service is just plain wrong. That would be like if cable stations gave you access to all of the stations but when American Idol came on, all of the other stations went staticy and the only station you could get in would be FOX. The freedom to go wherever we want for news and information on the Internet is one of the things that makes it great. I could go on about this issue for a while but something has to be done before things get really screwed up on the Internet.

On that respect, I've also heard minor rumblings about websites having to file for a "Seal of Approval" to be on the Internet. You would have to get the governments approval to put your website on the web. It would be like filing to start up a small business. Again, I don't need to tell you how wrong/extremely stupid this is.

Also, Congress is currently working on a deal that will make it illegal to upload music from CDs onto your computer and anyone caught having programs like Alcohol 120 or any DVD uploading programs could be sentenced up to 10 years in prison. I swear pretty soon we're not going to have the freedom to do anything with our purchases.

SPORTS

Onto something less political, I really liked the Packers draft this year. I think A.J. Hawk was a very smart first round pick and I think the trades Ted Thompson made were all extremely crafty. He did a great job of adding some much needed depth in some very important areas and in just the matter of a week and a half took a pretty crappy team and made it into a contender. Should be a fun season next year.

I hate eating crow, but I've had to do that after the Brewers sweep of the Braves. Not only that but the Braves have just played some horrible baseball this season and they're losing way too many close games. Luckily being 5 games out of first place at the end of April isn't unusual as they've mananged to clime greater deficits to continue their dominance of the NL East, but this year could be a little more difficult the way the Mets are playing. Also, my fantasy baseball team is kicking ass as I've yet to lose a series this season and have been in first place the entire time.

ENTERTAINMENT

The summer blockbuster season begins this Friday as Tom Cruise's crazy ass stars in Mission Impossible III coming out this Friday. I'll be hitting a showing of it after my last day of work at Target on Saturday. I've heard really good things and JJ Abrams apparently has done a wonderful job on the flick, so it should be a good one.

I've changed the wallpaper on my computer from the V for Vendetta symbol to a picture of Ellen Page as Kitty Pryde in X3. X3 looks pretty good but one scene I saw of Colossus and Wolverine performing the "fastball special" looked pretty damn cheesy. It seemed more like Rush Hour than X-Men. I expected Storm to say to Wolverine, "Never touch a black woman's radio boy."

Speaking of Ellen Page, Hard Candy gets a wider release this weekend and I really hope it's hitting Green Bay somewhere. It looks like a pretty dark and twisted movie, and all the buzz has been positive. Should be a good one.

This is the last weekend of new Budget movies I'll be able to watch as I'm moving out next Friday and won't be able to hit up anything. Hopefully they add something crappy that I really want to check out like Date Movie but I'm sure they'll put on The Shaggy Dog instead. At least I know Anthony will be buying Date Movie when it comes out so I'll be able to peep it that way. And for the record, I've seen 38 movies at the Budget theater in 2006, I should really get let in free at least once.

Thanks to my iPod shuffle, I was able to listen to Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington while driving. That was one of the highlights of the year for me... it's been a pretty sad year.

If you're curious, through the first four months of the year, V for Vendetta would walk away with the Brenty Award for best film, but there's still 8 months to go and Clerks II to come out, so I don't think it will finish that way at the end of the year.

I've got to go check the mail to see if Scott possibly sent the comics up here this month.

As I woke up this morning, it occured to me that I really didn't finish off my point on karmic retribution yesterday. I went on a big rant on My Name is Earl and then as usual my ADD kicked into gear and I started talking about how much I hated Ultraviolet.

I became pretty irratable as the day went on yesterday. The beginning part was fun, just kicking back and watching football teams draft players. It was fun for a while but after all the bigger names players came off the board it became extremely boring. I sat around and left for work at 2:30, since I always leave for work thirty minutes before the start of my shift, so I'm there a few minutes early. As I was rocking out to Metallica on the way out to the parking lot, I wandered out into about the middle of the parking lot because I've been parking towards the middle because of the massive amounts of cars in our lot. I couldn't find my vehicle and realized that a'duh it was because I got a good parking spot in the first row, so I walked across the parking lot to my car, got in to start it and the vehicle wouldn't start. I wondered if I put the key in the right thing or what was going on. Even the thought of it being someone elses car crossed my mind until I looked around and realized that I had left my inside lights on. I never use my inside lights because they're not that good, but when I was out in my car trying to get my FM transmitter to work one night, I had used them so I could see a little bit and since they weren't really that bright, I had forgotten to turn them off.

So I paniced and called my dad first. Because clearly even though he was 100 miles away, he could help. Well he wasn't at home, so I ran back to my dorm room to go onto Target.com to look up the number for the store, since I had no idea what it was and I knew I was going to be at least a little bit late. I went into the parking lot and talked to one guy and he said that he had jumper cables. He moved his car into position so that we could hook them together and as he searched through his car, he realized that he didn't have the cables in there. So I thanked him for the effort. He offered to drive me to work, even though I've never met him before. But I knew I had to get the problem fixed, so figured to just wait around the parking lot until the next car came. About two minutes later a red car appeared in the parking lot and I looked into the car and realized it was the RA from the floor above where I live. I talked to him and he moved his vehicle over by mine and finally after about 10 minutes finally got enough juice into my vehicle for it to run. So huge thanks to both of the dudes for helping me out, since I know you're both out there reading this right now. But seriously, thanks a bunch.

I got to work at about 3:20, which wasn't that bad. Granted I'm like Burt Reynolds behind the wheel but still. So as I got into work and looked at what department I had been working in I saw the time 3:30 to 10 listed there. I became puzzled as I know I had 3 written down. Turned out I wasn't late for work but instead was still 10 minutes early. It was a good thing I was leaving early.

The next thing I decided to do was to look at the schedule for the week of May 7, since this was going to be the first one I wasn't one...and there was my name with a couple of times listed on when I should be there that week. I ran over to Russ (the HR guy) and wondered what the hell was going on. I turned in my note a month ago, so I gave plenty of notice and he said that I shouldn't worry and he'll take care of it. So in other words, I'll be getting a call Sunday, May 7 telling me to come into work even though I technically am not working there anymore.

The rest of the night was pretty sharky (Aquamarine reference). After going through a pretty crappy couple of hours, I wasn't in the mood for work. I did my work, but a little slower than I should have due to the fact that I was just kind of shaken and didn't want to make sure to drop a box on my face and make the day even grander.

The day at work began to get better though and after the store closed I helped Angela with some easy tasks over in electronics and we talked movies for a while. She asked about Fun With Dick and Jane and I told her about Schwartzy. Then she talked about how someone she sang with in high school was in a recent episode of CSI:NY. And then I went on a couple of rants about 8MM 2 and whether or not there was really a reason for it to be made. Seriously, did anyone actually enjoy the first one? The only reason to see it was because Nicolas Cage was actually cool at the time but even he couldn't make the movie decent. I certainly don't want to see 8MM with a list of no-name actors and a budget smaller than A Ninja's Payoff.

Then while I was stuffing tags, I came across a movie named Saint Ralph. And I had to investigate into whether or not this was a sequel to the critically acclaimed, Academy Award winning (I think) classic movie, King Ralph. Turns out, it was about some retarded kid or something. So John Goodman will forever be held down into the sole rank of king and never progress to the saintly rank that he rightly deserves.

So it certianly could have been a worse day yesterday, but things didn't turn out too bad.

After working a mere 4 hours today. Which was corn chips for a mighty warrior like myself, I grabbed some taco bell in hopes of getting diarrhea tonight and then went to the Budget to see diarrhea in film form, Aquamarine. That was merely a joke, as I actually dug the flick. I'm a sucker for mermaid movies as I loved the Little Mermaid growing up. I know that probably ruins my masculinity a bit, but it's true. The movie left with a legitimate cliff hanger though, and I really want to find out what happens, so they better pump out Aquamarine 2 sometime very soon. Hell if 8MM gets a sequel, Aquamarine should.

But yeah, I'm going to end this very exciting two part installment of "Like Shaq Shooting Free Throws..." and get ready for a good night of TV with new 'sodes of Family Guy, American Dad, Andy Milonakis, Wonder Showzen and Robot Chicken tonight, I'm in geek heaven. Good night now.

I'm sure by now you all have seen My Name is Earl. If not, you probably are at least aware of the premise of the show. To put it in a nutshell for those living in a cave, it's a show about karma. Good things happening to good people and bad things happening to bad people. And one bad guy trying to do good things to change his bad luck. Recently, I've decided to add a little bit of entertainment in my life, since Green Bay has become extremely crappy. Crappier than usual. At least last year, I kind of had people to hang out with, this year I couldn't pay anyone to be with me. Maybe I could just hire some strippers and molest them, but I'm not a lacrosse player, so that probably wouldn't work.

So, I cracked open my extremely thin wallet and spent the small amounts of money that I accumulated over the semester in one ginormous spending endeveor. After seeing a kick ass charger for an iPod shuffle on clearance at Target, I decided to come home last Sunday night and order me one of those bad boys. Little did I know, what I had boughten was just a charger and wasn't able to play the shuffle over the radio. The box said "Charge and play your iPod shuffle." I figured it out the next day and was able to find an FM Transmitter/Car Charger a couple of days later on clearance at Target, so all was good. I bought a 1GB Shuffle for $89 after the student discount on the Apple store, and the car charger was half off and only costed me $25. So I got a really good deal on both.

Also, on Tuesday night after hearing nothing but extremely awesome things about Guitar Hero and sitting in the computer lab in between classes watching scenes from the game, I decided to finally buy it. And wow, seriously one of the most fun games I've played. After a couple of days though, I hit a wall and the songs started kicking my ass. Granted I'm not the most musically gifted individual on the planet and haven't played an instrument since the days of the recorder in elementary school, and I even sucked playing that. But even though the songs are rocking my crotch with difficulty, I'm having a fun time and actually working towards learning the hard to play songs instead of just giving up right away, like I do with every other game I've ever boughten. I still want to have a Guitar Hero party sometime, but I guess I'll have to wait until I'm back in Kewaskum, since I have no friends in Green Bay.

With these big purchases, I'm laying off of the DVDs for a while. I resisted buying Veronica Mars: s1, The O.C.: s2, and Gilmore Girls: s5, this last week at Target and they were only $23. So as you can tell, I'm pretty serious about stopping the DVD buying.

Since I don't really know what else to talk about and can't possibly end an entry this early, I'll just review-mini a couple of the latest flicks I saw either at the Budget or at the Marc.

16 Blocks: Saw it yesterday and it was pretty decent. Bruce Willis gives a great performance and Mos Def showed some talent as well. Really dug the story and execution. I recommend giving it a rent if you're in the mood for a good cop thriller-esque movie.

Eight Below: I'm not a big dog fan or a big Paul Walker fan, but I was really looking forward to this flick. Jason Biggs had the 12 year olds laughing their asses off and the scenes with the dogs trying to survive were brilliant. Paul Walker's story actually brought the movie to a halt, in which otherwise was a damn good survival story. I still recommend it, but I wish they would have edited it down a little bit. Also the bitches in front of me ruined the movie for me because they were just saying the stupidest shit. So don't see this movie with two stupid bitches that talk a lot.

Nanny McPhee: Completely rocked my asshole. It was one of those completely obvious fairy-tale movies, but yet it was so damn awesome. I was freaking out because Colin Firth, Sam-O, that hot foreign maid chick and Rickman's wife from Love Actually were all in this movie. And I love Love Actually, so everytime I saw Simon (Sam from Love Actually) on the screen, I would bust out my Liam Neeson "Sam-O" impression. But yeah, no really big surprises but excellently executed. Highly recommend watching it.

Firewall: Your typical crime-thriller-Harrison Ford movie. Most of it was given away in the trailer but seeing Chloe from 24 in the movie was pretty awesome. I say check it out if you like Harrison Ford's latest movies, but if you think everything he's done since Indiana Jones has sucked, avoid it.

Silent Hill: I thought this movie was going to be balls to the wall awesome after seeing the trailers and reading the early reviews, ultimately I was disappointed. There were a couple of creepy scenes, but not nearly enough as most of the movie was spent in suspenseless situations. Check it out if you're in the mood for a scary movie, but temper expectations a bit. Don't expect this to be nearly as messed up as the video games, especially Silent Hill 2, which completely freaked me out.

Ultraviolent: This will be the last review-mini for this entry. And holy shit did this movie piss me off. Very few times have I wanted to leave the theater about 40 minutes into a movie. First off, the storyline was completely retarded. And I thought, hey at least the fight scenes might be good, but yeah, somehow Violet when confronted by 50 dudes was able to kill all of them without getting so much as a scratch on her. It's cool in Kill Bill because she's just that pissed off at Lucy Liu's character, but when a girl does it like 40 times in the span of a 80 minute movie it becomes redundant. At least they could have made the CG city look decent right.... wrong. Honestly, I've seen video games with more realistic looking cities than this. The graphics were horrible and even the most exciting scenes of the movie were pretty damn boring. As one IMDb review put it, "About 10 minutes into the movie I started praying for a brain tumor to arrive and kill me."

Well, I'm going to do the second most exciting thing possible on a Saturday night, go to bed early. Obviously, the number one most exciting thing is to sit around and type a blog entry.

Well it's been a busy couple of days after my lazy weekend. Man, I seriously enjoyed just sitting around the ol' FOS watching baseball and DVDs. I watched The Corpse Bride, Robots, War of the Worlds, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith for the first time, as well as countless other cartoon DVDs. It was vunderbar.

Finally heard the new TOOL song on the Razor today. So far I had missed it twice because right before I was going into work they would say, "after the break we'll have the new TOOL song." And I seriously considered being late for work to hear it. I'm not going to lie to you, it wasn't all that and a bag of potato chips...but it was pretty damn close. If it was any other band it would have been their greatest song, but on the TOOLbar it ranks at about a 4 out of 5.

Saw Hoodwinked, Doogal, and The Pink Panther today at the Budget. Not really going to talk about much in depth but they were all decent. That's not what I wanted to touch on from today's Budget trip though. Before going to see Doogal (the second of the three movies), I was just standing around the lounge as I like to do and this african-american guy on a bench started talking to me, since we were in a movie theater we started talking about movies. He was mentioning how his girl got thrown in jail so he was up here watching her kids and that he spent pretty much everyday at the Budget theater and he saw Glory Road or as he called it "Road to Glory" 4 times. We ended up seeing Doogal together. Now I had no idea how old Will (that's his name) was, until he mentioned that he was 47, which was weird because he looked a lot younger than that, but he was talking about how one of the kids was around my age and planning to go to UWGB. But yeah, really cool dude.

I got home and I found out that Stacy and Tiffany were looking for me from my presidential roommate. I guess you probably don't know who Stacy and Tiffany are because I haven't talked about them yet. They're two girls from the second floor in Liebl and last Tuesday they came over to visit Zeb. Well, they ended up coming into my room and after talking about Hilary Duff for a couple minutes and seeing the Duff Corner in my basement, Stacy, Tiffany, Zeb and myself spent about 2 hours talking about random stuff and trying to guess Zeb's middle and parents names. It turns out that Zebulun (which is one of the tribes of Iraq, according to Tiffany's version of the bible) Optimus Prime Rutter's parents names are Megatron and Betty Sue. They were really cool... and a tad on the drunk side (not redonkulously but they were enjoying their tasty beverage). But yeah, apparently they were looking for me. I have no idea why and figured they probably didn't remember my existance because such a thing is easy to forget. But that was pretty cool because most people I know around here wouldn't be looking to hang out with me.

One last thing before I end this entry, last night I had a dream where I was in a movie theater. I'm now watching movies in my sleep and that is awesome.

Well for the first time since a week before spring break, I have Saturday and Sunday off of work. This is actually good timing as my group project in my marketing class is due next week Thursday. Since I'm a lazy bastard, I haven't even begun my part of the group work yet, luckily my partner has picked me up and has done most of the hard stuff leaving me with a couple of pages of stuff to write after he's done about 16 pages of stuff. So big ups to Terry not being a lazy bastard otherwise we'd be completely screwed. Meanwhile, I'm already a couple of hours into the day and haven't even begun working on the assignment, granted I was doing laundry for some of the time and I also helped my roommate take out the trash (even though none of it was mine). I also watched a couple of Beavis and Butt-Head shorts and listened to two episodes of one of my favorite podcasts, Geekdrome.

So I'm writing a blog entry in hopes of it trying to strike some inspirado and begin working on said project. In the meantime, I'll fill you in on the latest occurances in life. I've got this feeling that I'm starting to become a geek because if you look at the last 6 DVDs I bought they consist of Wet Hot American Summer, Robot Chicken: Season 1, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Volume 4, Beavis & Butt-Head: Volume 1 and Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Volumes 2 & 3. And quite frankly if that isn't a geeky combination of DVDs, I don't know what would classify.

Since I have the weekend off, it would feel wrong to not go to see at least one movie at a movie theater. Even though the project should be my main priority, I've got to get out and see at least one flick. So I'm probably going to hit up Lucky Number Slevin because from what I saw via the trailer and TV spots, it looked pretty good. I am tempted to see SLiTHER again because that movie is the bees knees, but I would feel guilty for seeing a movie twice when there's other stuff out there that I haven't seen once and unlike Anthony I would rather see 27 crappy movies 1 time then to see 1 epic movie 27 times.

Just because I haven't talked about it at all in the blog yet, my fantasy baseball team is pretty awesome. After the first week of the season last week, I won 9-1. And this week, I'm winning 8-2 thus far allthough we're very close in a couple of categories so it could either way at this point. I just dropped Barry Bonds' steroid using ass yesterday because he wasn't doing anything and because after hearing some of the latest stuff about how horrible of a teammate he is to other players, I didn't want him polluting my fantasy clubhouse atmosphere.

While my fantasy baseball team is looking very good, the Braves are looking kind of meh at the moment. The pitching has been horrible but the offense has been remarkable. The Mets are off to a really fast start and will probably keep kicking the Brewers ass the rest of the weekend, so the Braves will have some catching up to do. I'm not worried though as the season has started out this way the last five years for the Braves and everybody starts talking about, "Is this finally the year the Braves lose?" And then by the all star break they're caught up to the team ahead of them and by the end of August they have the division won.

Did I mention my marketing project is on the Milwaukee Brewers, hence the baseball talk. I'm trying to get myself psyched about this project and I am. I love talking about about baseball but talking about baseball in a marketing basis just doesn't get my gears grinding as much as it probably should.

If you can't tell by my away messages recently, I'm on a huge Weird Al kick at the moment, as I believe Anthony is as well. I guess the possibility of a new ALbum being released sometime in the next month or so is what's causing this, well that and the fact that Weird Al is just the fucking man.

Well, I just looked at the movie times because I forgot when Slevin was playing and it's in about 5 minutes, whoops. So I'll be hitting up Scary Movie 4 instead, mostly to see the Clerks II trailer on the big screen, even though I already watched it a few times on the Internet and posted it to my MySpace account. Maybe I should see Benchwarmers instead as it would apply to my project.....yeah, I think I'm going to see Benchwarmers, which means I have to leave now. (And just if you're wondering, this last paragraph is basically my entire thought process, so if you're a psych major you can analyze that and clone me or whatever they do.) Nooch.

Update**** I ended up seeing Scary Movie 4 instead. I called my parents up on the way to the theater and when talking to my mom she said that "only retards would find The Benchwarmers funny." And if my mom talks that much smack about a Happy Madison flick, which normally she loves, then I'm not going to waste my timoney on it. Scary Movie 4 was alright for a few laughs. I kind of wish I would have seen War of the Worlds first because a large part of the movie was a take on that. Recommended viewing to optimize the laughs in Scary Movie 4 are The Village, The Grudge, knowing the basic outline of Brokeback Mountain, War of the Worlds, and Saw. The storyline was a lot better then I was expecting and it looked awesome. It was shot using HighDef video and they did a pretty good job with the CGI tripods and not actually spending money on making stuff look right instead of going for the cheesy look. I'd have to say that while it is very hit-or-miss and there aren't any real laugh moments that they haven't exhausted in the trailer, it was a lot better than Scary Movie 2 and a little better than Scary Movie 3. I still think the first is the best but this one is up there. So if you're in the mood for sitting in the dark for an hour and a half with a bunch of tweens and not seeing a Lindsay Lohan movie, I'd recommend it.

Well, it certainly has been a while since I last typed some stuff in here. I could make excuses, but excuses piss me off so let's just do some livejournaling instead.

I went to the first Piggly Wiggly/Brewer Extravaganza held this past Friday and it was a great time. Good to see both past and current Piggly Wiggly workers together for an awesome night of baseball action. I was going to shoot a semi-documentary about the game and talk to Piggly Wiggly workers and edit it together and put it on YouTube. I got some good footage of Schano (sp?) talking about stuff on the ride down but when in the parking lot due to the huge amounts of wind and hail, I decided to just keep the camera in my pocket and not play around with it. Well, it turns out that after I got into the stadium my camera decided to stop working and the lens wouldn't come out and when I finally got it to come out, I couldn't zoom or get the lens back in. I got about 8 minutes of video of people before the game. I plan on doing a little editing and putting that up on YouTube for about 4 people to see. Of course, with my camera taking a shit on me, I had to send it in to get warrantied, so I should be receiving a new camera (or this one fixed) in a few weeks, so I wouldn't be able to edit my documentary-mini until that time. Depending upon how this turns out and if I get a working camera, I should be shooting some more fun videos in the near future, so I'll keep you up to date on anything that happens in that department.

Meanwhile, I've had some pretty packed days over the past week. I've spent way too much time working at Target this weekend and only had about 3 hours to actually have fun, so I watched some Beavis and Butt-Head and Wet Hot American Summer extras. That was really all that happened besides getting lost in the aisles of Target due to the massive aisle changing going on. They're moving a lot of the stuff to new locations and I have no idea where anything is in any department besides toys because they're already done with it and I've been scheduled back there everyday I've worked.

I've started to get outside a bit more recently as I've begun my own personal spring training here in Green Bay. The last two nights I've played a bit of catch with myself outside of Liebl Hall. It's good to get outside and work on my baseball skills a little bit more. I'm probably going to be out there a lot, well until the bees start coming out. I hate bees.

Besides that not a whole lot is going on besides the usual, I'm still listening to a lot of podcasts, I've got a big pile of DVDs (Well like 4 but that's pretty big for me) that I'm trying to get through, and I'm up to 36 movies that I've seen in a movie theater so far in 2006 with Munich and possibly Glory Road tomorrow night.

I worked on my schedule for fall classes today and it didn't turn out too bad. I'll have to get up a bit earlier then I did for this last semester, but I kind of like getting up early. But everything looks pretty solid, only one class on Friday and 16 credits worth of stuff to keep me extremely occupied when I'm not busy seeing movies at the Budget, watching DVDs, listening to podcasts, or bitching about my roommate in my LiveJournal.

Alright, there's your "I'm way too tired and I want to go to bed but I should probably type something for LiveJournal real quick because I haven't done that in like a week, and even though it won't be funny at least they'll have something to read that was typed by me because like it's April and I haven't even typed one of these up in April yet and normally it's weird for me to miss one day but I've missed like 12 days of not updating this at all so I probably should really do that right now especially since those toytles just defeated that evil Shredder again, when will he ever learn that he'll never be able to outsmart those savvy ninja turtles" entry.

Well I suppose it's aboot time I update all of you LiveJournalists out there about the ever so exciting life of me. And guess what, not a whole hell of a lot has changed over the past updateless days, sometimes it's a curse to be this beautiful...I guess.

I did my accounting test on Wednesday. It went well but I don't think I did as good on it as I was hoping to. I guess we'll see when I get it back Mondayish.

Because of said test, I wasn't able to hit up the Budget Theater this Tuesday night. I know you're worried that I won't be able to break 100 movies in movie theaters for the year, but just take it easy. I'll be seeing around 6 movies between the weekend and Tuesday night. I know for sure that I'll be seeing The Godfather of Green Bay tomorrow night and have yet to figure out when exactly I'll be watching the movies at the Budget but I've got Syriana, The Chronicles of Narnia, Big Momma's House 2, Final Destination 3 and When a Stranger Calls all on my plate, should be a good couple of days.

I really haven't done much else besides watch a lot of TV and listen to a lot of podcasts. I'm subscribed to about 20 podcasts on iTunes and I'm truly loving each and everyone of them. I've also added Bones to my regular TV watching schedule since it's on at a time when there is nothing good on.

I had to work a lot at Target this week too, which has kind of sucked. I was scheduled three days and I picked up a fourth day because a dude needed off and I'm a tool. Oh well, I bought Robot Chicken today because I justified that since I picked up that bonus shift, that it was paying for the DVD set. I'm only scheduled two days next week, which is fine because I want to spend more time playing video games, so that works out quite nicely. Then in two weeks I'm scheduled four days in one week. Where was this kind of scheduling when I was absolutely broke and had to live off of $10 for 3 days with no food in the kitchen while waiting for the next bi-weekly paycheck? Now that I actually have money, they start scheduling me. Oh well, more coke and whore money for the summer months.

In the meantime, if you're thinking to yourself, I wish that sexy stud Brent Strassburg would graciously give me some more of those hilarious surveys that he used to do all the time, well my friend all you have to do is visit my MySpace page as I've recently been regularly filling those out and posting them there. And if you're a member of MySpace, just subscribe to my blog that way you'll get an e-mail whenever I update that bad boy.

Now I know what else you're thinking, God I wish that quintessential studmuffin would let me know what he's doing this weekend so that way I can more easily stalk him, well I'll tell you.

Friday is actually going to be a busy day. I'm going to make a stop at Wendy's for some grub which will be my breakfast for the day because I have no breakfasty items around here. I've been eating cans of soup and spaghettios for breakfast this week. After Wendy's, I'll be hitting up one of my favorite places in Green Bay, The Great Escape comic book store. I'm not sure if I'm going to buy anything but it will be fun to look around and look at all the pretty comic books I can't afford. Maybe I'll score some back issues of Runaways or that new Illumaniti special that Bendis wrote, we'll see. After the comic book store, I'll be going to Piggly Wiggly. Allthough, I think I'm just going to go and hang around in the backroom and talk about Buffy. I wish the vendors up here were the same ones as in Kewaskum because it's always fun shooting the shit with those guys, except Larry the Butternut Guy. *Insert Get Ir Done joke here* After the grocery store, I'm going to chill in the FOS and then go hit up some flicks. I've also got a lot of taped shows because of my work schedule this week, so I'm hoping to get caught up on Bones, Veronica Mars, Smallville, Earl, Office, Spade's Show, Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Should be a very fun day.

Saturday, I'm probably going to hit up Narnia at the Budget theater or possibly She's The Man on the other side of town depending upon how I feel, but I'll probably just go the easy route and see Narnia. I've got to work 4:30 to 10:30 and then I'm going to be all depressed and moody because of my lack of social life the rest of the night.

Sunday, I might go see a flick or two at the Budget depending upon what I saw on Friday and Saturday but I'll spend most of the day extremely happy because the baseball season is finally upon us. Also, the new season of Robot Chicken starts on Adult Swim. Damn, this weekend is going to be steak sauce.

Well, I made it safely back to Green Bay today and I brought my car along with me. It will definitley be fun driving my car around this city for the next 7 weeks instead of the truck because of the huge amounts of gas money I'll be saving and because my car is f'n awesome and the lizadies will be all over me like butter on toast.

I don't have a huge amount of free time this week, so that's going to suck. Normally, I'm not one of those college students that's like, "OMG, I'm so busy. I have so much homework to do and a test to study for." But yeah, I've got a huge accounting test that I need to do awesome on and I have to work the night before it, so my normal waiting to the last night to study for it routine will not work this time around. So I'll be spending most of tonight and Monday night studying for the very fun accounting test I have to take on Wednesday. Add to this the excitement of me working Wednesday and Thursday night also at the Big Circle (With a Smaller Circle Inside) and you've got a pretty busy five day period going on. Luckily, I have the weekend off which means that I'll have plenty of time to get caught up on the movies I've missed at the Budget theater.

Speaking of which, before I begin my 37 hours of studying (in a row), I'm going to go el Budgeto and check out Memoirs of a Geisha today at 2:30. I'm not really looking forward to it, but it's either see it today or not seeing it at all because I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be on come Friday. Plus, Ziyi Zhang is pretty hot.

Other then that, not a lot has been going on. Worked a lot of hours at the Pig and saw a couple of awesome flicks, which I'll do my review-mini on real quick.

Saw V for Vendetta on Thursday night with Anthony and Tim. Farkin' amazing movie. No wonder everyone at Ain't It Cool News was saying that it was the best movie of last year (it was originally supposed to come out last year and they saw it at festivals and stuff before it was pushed back to this month). I'm a huge fan of dialogue in movies and would much rather see a movie with a lot of kick ass dialogue then kick ass fight scenes and this movie succeeded in laying down some verbose the likes of which has rarely been seen. The action scenes weren't plentiful nor were they prolonged but they were astonishing none-the-less.

Saturday afternoon, I hit up Paradise with the folks to see Inside Man. Inside Man is a bank heist movie with Clive Owen, Denzel Washington, and Jodie Foster for those wondering about it. Also, the Operative from Serenity is in it. It was directed by Spike Lee and it was directed magnificently. I'm not normally a big fan of Spike Lee's movies, but have always dug his directive style. This was a very intelligent movie and had you thinking throughout. Very solid flick.

Well, I'm off to grab some grub and hit up Geisha. GO VILLANOVA!

I've decided that I'm going to keep doing daily entries... but after break. For some reason, when I get home I jut don't feel like writing much so I'm going to enjoy the break as much as possible and do a few update minis over the time period instead of big ass daily entries.

Haven't really been doing much. While many college students go down to warmer climates like Florida and Mexico for Spring Break, I chose a cooler climate, the dairy cooler and freezer of Piggly Wiggly in Kewaskum, Wisconsin. I worked 8 hours yesterday and 9 hours today, which is more then I've worked at Target for the past two months. Got to work with the new kid, Zach. He's a good guy and I look forward to killing... I mean working with him again soon.

Watched Kung Fu Hustle on DVD. I was a big fan of Stephen Chow's previous film, Shaolin Soccer and had high hopes for this one. Didn't dig it as much as Shaolin Soccer, but it was a fun film. Amazing fight sequences but didn't bring the funny or have nearly as good of a story as Shaolin Soccer.

Watched White Noise on HBO Sunday night. I thought the premise was a good idea but after a while it just got corny. The "evil ghosts" in the movie were pretty stupid and what started off with promise ended in disappointment. Maybe Fillion's sequel will be better... at least I hope so.

Tonight's [scrubs] with commentary was probably the last one they're doing because of Teachers starting next week. I really like Johnny C and Neil Flynn talking about the episode and the commentary was much better with two people instead of the usual one person commentary they've had for the first two installments. Head over to NBC.com and give it a listen, granted you don't have the episode to watch, but it's not really necessary.

A bit confused on the South Park/Isaac Hayes situation. It was reported that he quit last week over the Scientology episode and now there are reports that he didn't really quit. The new episode, which airs tomorrow night is about Chef, so I'm guessing he's still on board. I figured when this went down that Matt and Trey just didn't want the news of him quitting to get out until before the new season, so they could use it as advertising for the new season. I guess in a way, I was right. We'll see what happens tomorrow night.

The Shield season finale was on tonight. Not going to talk about what happened in case you TiVoD it, but holy shit. Loved this season. Started off a little slow but man did it finish strong.

I have a fantasy baseball draft tomorrow and I've yet to work on any strategy or depth charts, whoops.

My college basketball bracket has been great thus far. I need some "upsets" to happen in the next round to help me out in some areas and hopefully Adam Morrison gets better soon. This was a horrible time to get the flu, but hopefully he'll be like Jordan and play through it and put up some of the best games of his career. Damn Jordan was great.

Don't have any weblinks or pictures, so that's all.

It's been a while since I did an entry. I'm not sure if I'm going to go back and fill in the past dates or not because I've been questioning things recently. I'm not really sure if you like the daily entries or not? Since I started doing them, I've had two "friends" drop me from their friends list and I guess that means I'm doing something wrong. I don't know if it's because the entries are too long, if they don't like my clogging up of their friends page, or why exactly I'm no longer considered their friend in LiveJournal form or maybe not in any other form either. So if you have any input on this manner what so ever, please let me know. If you like the daily entries but wish I wouldn't write so much, do an update every couple of days that's longer or like what I was doing and shouldn't change a thing, please post a comment and let me know. Because I've spent a lot of time, including most of Thursday night debating on this issue and want feedback from those of you who are gracious enough to spend time reading this. So please let me know on this issue as soon as you can.

In the meantime, I'll post a little update on what I did this weekend. I didn't do much except watch a buttload of college basketball. My bracket is still in pretty darn good shape and I'm tied for third place in my league which has 50 teams in it. My final four is Villanova, UConn, Gonzaga, and LSU, with Villanova over Gonzaga in the championship. I went with a riskier field of teams and hopefully that will work out for me.

I saw Failure to Launch on Saturday with my parents. If you're a fan of romantic comedies, I'm sure you'll dig this one (speaking to Anthony here). Sarahica Jessica Parker and Matthew McConawannadingdong were both pretty great leads and the story while extremely stereotypical (as all romcom plots are) certainly could have been worse. Terry Bradshaw was surprisingly good in a rare acting performance and let's just say a side of Terry Bradshaw was shown that should never be seen.

Weblink of the Day:The trailer for the must see movie event of 2006: Snakes on a Plane

( Daily Pictures )

Ok, I'm pretty pissed off right about now. I had a pretty huge entry going and because I'm a complete idiot, I accidently closed the window instead of another one and of course this was after typing about a thousand words and nearly completing the entry for the day. And after that hour of work, I don't have the time or energy to type all that up again so I'm going to make this one short and crappy, but let me tell you the last one was pretty damn awesome. Don't hate the player, hate the autosave feature on LiveJournal, because I only got the word "I" saved for me.

I woke up at 8:27 and jumped out of bed, literally. It's a good thing my foot wasn't asleep otherwise I would have cracked my head on the dresser. After getting up and watching some vids online, I took my shower and ate a delicous turkey and cheese roll-up. During the day I finished the last two episodes of Tru Calling: Season 1.

I had to leave early for school because I had to meet a girl at noon. And this wasn't just any girl, it was one I had to pay for. Ok, that might be a bit misleading. I had to meet Tiffany, one of the officers in ASA to pay my union dues for the semester to become a member of the Accounting Student Association, officially. After I paid my money, I found a table in a hallway and just sat down and read a comic book because I'm the man. Nothing exciting happened in school, so let's just skip over it.

After coming back to the FOS, I watched some vids online, listened to the new MLB podcast because Braves OF Jeff Francouer was interviewed, some jams and one of the Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant XFM radio shows. I only have about 60 more episodes of the Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant show to get through at about an hour a piece, so I'll be spending a lot of time listening to them over the next couple of months. I kind of want to buy an iPod and spent some time looking at them online today so that way I could carry around the ramblings of Karl Pilkington and listen to them while filling milk in the dairy cooler and other fun places like that.

I watched the new episode of Veronica Mars after that. Another great episode and The CW would be really f'n stupid if they have any doubt of picking it up. Team it up with Gilmore Girls and that would be one testosterone filled night of television. After V-Mars, I listened to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Geekdrome. In Geekdrome, two guys basically spend 50 minutes a week talking about movies, comics and video games. And while it may not be perfect in execution, it's still pretty darn entertaining. I also did some laundry during this time to get most of it done before going home for break.

I finished up the night the usual way with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I had to make a stop over at Letterman because Matt Stone and Trey Parker were on and it's not very often that they're on talk shows. I flipped over to Leno to watch Rob Zombie perform and then watched Conan.

Again, the original version was a lot better and I had to cut out a lot stuff that I really wanted to type about. But right now my eyes are about ready to sleep.

Weblink of the Day: John Krasinski and Rainn Wilson on Ellen from Last Week

( Daily Pictures )