Tips for the single homeowner.

I own a house. I do not have a wife, live-in girlfriend or roommate to split any of the upkeep of the house, much less any of the mortgage payment. So it's all pretty much me in charge here, which is a good thing. I am my own man. I am a rock, I am an island, dammit. What I have found for all of you single homeowners (and prospective single homeowners) is a simple system that will help you manage to juggle the time constraints of having regular employment as well as a home. First of all, there are four things a single homeowner should strive for:

1. A house exterior and landscaping that is well-maintained.
2. A house interior that is well-kept and cleaned regularly.
3. A healthy social life.
4. A good night's sleep (preferably at least 7 hours).

Now what you do is look at that list. Look at it really hard. Think about what is most important to you in your life, what will bring you the most satisfaction... and then pick two. You can't have all four. Trust me on this, because I've tried. You can think, "oh, I'll split the exterior and interior time and it'll be cool," but the fact of the matter is that you can't. Both will look like crap. Trust me. You can forego sleep and friendship and really have an awesome looking house. You will never get to enjoy it, however. Sorry. You can have a great social life while being well-rested, but you will never, ever want to invite anyone over to your house. Your house will look worse than Lindsey Lohan after a mad bender of a weekend, so that's a no-go. Sorry.

"But Maki, I want it all!" you say. Well take heart, fair reader, I have the solution! It's a simple three-step process that can turn that homeowning frown upside down! Remember, these must be done in the proper order for it to work.

1. Get a better-paying job, you bottom-feeder.
2. Hire a lawn service.
3. Hire a maid.

Life just got immediately better, didn't it? Then again, there's the two-step process, which works even better:

1. Sell house.
2. Buy condo.

It's like getting a free lawn service. Everybody wins! So what if you can hear your neighbors having sex. So what if you can't turn your home theater up loud enough to knock loose dental fillings. So what if you'll have to pay association fees on top of your mortgage costs? So what if you'll never, ever be able to sell it for a profit since people only shell out for new condos? You've cut the list down to 3 choices instead of 4, and that really is the key.

There is, however, one more option available to you. It's a very high risk/reward situation, and really should only be used as a last resort. I am presenting it here for the sake of completeness, since I don't want to leave any stone unturned.

1. Get mail-order bride.

She'll be happy to have a green card, and you can put her to work. You can see the inherent dangers if this plan backfires. Proceed with caution.

Hopefully this has been a helpful little post that will allow you, the single homeowner, to balance your time and live the half-a-life that you had always hoped for. As for me, it's time to go out and pull some weeds and mow the lawn. See you out there!

I know it's wrong, but...

I don't care if Michael Jackson molested children or is just a weirdo-freak-half-human-mutant-over-surgeryized thing or not.

Off The Wall is still FREAKING AWESOME.

"Rock With You" is like the best song ever. And, no, that's not the one I heard at Publix. It wasn't "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" either, or else I would have had to bust out some moves right there in the snack aisle. I'm not even joking.

Maki's handy guide to creating a loyal following for your blog!

1. Be a hot chick.
2. Post pictures.

Hope this helps!

Disclaimer: Yes, I know everyone with a blog who is not a hot chick with pictures has to post this sooner or later.

I heard a song I liked at the grocery store.

I'm walking down the snack food aisle, and as I pick up a box of Quaker Chewy Granola Bars, all of a sudden here's this song I like playing over the speakers. I started mouthing the words and singing along in my head to it since I knew all the lyrics and then I realized something...

I WAS AT FUCKING PUBLIX.

This makes me sad. I used to be so cool. Now I've been reduced to this. Here I am, enjoying the background music at Publix. I'm not even gonna tell you what song it was, because you'll point and laugh at me and my ego is feeling fragile enough as it is. If it was Billy Ocean's "Carribbean Queen" I would tell you right now, because that song is fucking awesome and you can shut the hell up if you don't think so. But it wasn't, so I'm not telling you.

I can see me doing this in 15 years when Gorillaz' "19-2000" is suddenly playing on the speakers at whatever Publix I'm shopping in. I've got my kids (named Broken Condom Maki [BCM for short] and She Said She Was Still On The Pill Maki [SSSWSOTPM for short]) in tow and I'm humming in my head, "get the cool, get the cool shoeshine..." And then I get home and write in my super-future-blog about how much I hate myself for liking the song I heard at the grocery store. Life is an endless cycle of disappointments, after all.

It felt too much like a job.

There's a reason I haven't posted very often lately. I kind of burned myself out. I guess it was bound to happen. Hey, it only took a little over two months to get there, too! Anyway, hopefully I'll be updating more soon, but don't expect more than a few a week. I know all 5 of my regular visitors will be disappointed by this news. Take heart, though! I'm going for quality over quantity these days. At least, that's my excuse.

Oh yeah, it looks like Natalie Portman and I have something in common these days, other than both of us hating all of her scenes with Hayden Christensen...



DAMN NATALIE, WHAT IS YOU THINKING.

At least she has the proper head shape for it. Imagine if her head was all lumpy and Scottie Pippen shaped and stuff? Ah, who am I kidding, she's still mind-blowingly hot.

Yes, this is the second time Samuel L. Jackson has made an appearance on the blog. I'm sure he's gonna call his agent to be sure that gets on his resume.

Well, this is it. The Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith review.

Okay, I'll admit that I'm not sure how to review a film that I've been waiting literally 22 years for. I thought Episode I was the movie I'd been waiting for, but we all know how that turned out, don't we? Then I figured Episode II would be the one. It was more on the right track, but that damn "love story" brought everything back down to reality. So I pinned my hopes on Episode III. Did I make the right choice? Kind of...

This time? Lucas got a lot right, but he still got a lot wrong. I really enjoyed the first 30 minutes and the last 45 minutes, but I had serious problems with a lot of it in between. It hurts, because, honestly, after waiting so long for this film, to see a lot of things that could have been fixed so easily go unfixed just bugs the hell out of me. Strap in, kids. This is gonna be a long one. I am going to be forced to give spoilers for the film because I can't really give an in-depth analysis without giving a lot away. You really should read this only after you've seen the movie, because we all know my review isn't going to make you go see it or not go see it. You've likely already made that decision. So don't even consider this a review. Consider it a critique with a number grade at the end.


SPOILERS FOLLOW, SO GO AWAY IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE DANG MOVIE YET.


I wanted to love Revenge of the Sith, and my feelings conflict the more I think about it. There's parts of this film that I love just as much as anything in the original films. There's also parts I really hate, but you know what? The parts I hated were still better than the stuff I hated in the other prequels. The problem I have is that the movie is so fast-paced and has so much momentum, that some characters get the short end of the stick. I have simple edits (and some not-so-simple edits) that could have changed the tone of scenes for what I consider to be the better.

First of all, the stuff with the Wookiees was completely unnecessary. It was simple fanboy pandering, which didn't advance the story in any way. Story-wise, all it did was make sure Yoda wasn't at the Jedi Temple during the slaughter. That's it. I can't believe that Lucas cut out and condensed storylines of other characters to make room for a few pointless battle scenes on Kashyyk. Padme suffers the worst from the cuts. She has about three scenes where she isn't sitting on the couch in her apartment. If we're supposed to care that Anakin is willing to destroy the Jedi and pretty much the entire Republic in order to gain the knowledge necessary to save her life, she needs to actually do something other than look pouty. Instead of any development for her, we get an extended cameo from Chewbacca in its place. We also get a battle that means nothing to us, because really, we've seen all of this enough times now.

Second, despite Samuel L. Jackson's claims to the contrary, Mace Windu goes out like a bitch. I'm sorry, but he does. He's able to best Palpatine in a lightsaber duel, but Anakin interferes at the wrong time and, of course, makes the wrong choice, allowing Palpatine to kill Windu. This is strictly a personal thing, but if you want me to care when someone dies, you don't show it in a long shot with him flung a mile away from the camera. You have him drop right there on that ledge. This gives added weight to what Anakin has just done. This also gives him the opportunity to debate, to give more of the, "oh god, what have I just done," reaction that he first exhibits. When there's a body in the room that he's just had a hand in killing, it makes it a lot tougher to atone for. Instead the scene plays out like this...

Anakin: "Oh crap, what have I done?"
Palpatine: "Sucks to be him. Become my apprentice so you can save your wife."
* Anakin hesitates for about 3 seconds or so *
Anakin: "Okay, I'll be your apprentice even though I narked on you to Windu five minutes ago. I'm evil now and I'm gonna go kill me some children."

Even a few more lines of dialogue there, with Palpatine convincing him to turn, after Anakin wavers for a bit would have sealed the deal for me. Even showing Anakin realizing he's got no other choice at this point would work. Instead it felt rushed, even if it is something that's been building since his mother's death in Episode II. Putting more dialogue in would have added maybe 60 seconds to the scene, but had so much more impact.

My single biggest problem, though, lies in this... You know what made the lightsaber battles in the original trilogy so great? It wasn't the moves they used, it was what was said between the characters who were fighting. I could recite just about everything said during both of the Luke/Vader fights in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (some of which reappears in slightly altered form at moments in Revenge of the Sith). I know, it's dorky to know that stuff, but stay with me for a minute here. I could ask you to recite me some lines of dialogue from any of the fights in Episode III, but you won't be able to because the dialogue is so far secondary to the fight choreography. This is a problem shared by all the prequels, sadly. This is what hurt the inevitable Anakin/Obi Wan fight for me. The impact is diminished severely by the fact that Obi Wan has given up on redeeming Anakin before the fight has even begun. What this turns the fight into is one big eye-candy sequence with emotional resonance that creeps in only after Obi Wan has defeated Anakin. What we get is essentially a video game sequence with ever-increasingly dangerous locales and some cheap-looking green-screen effects. If the fight had played out with Obi Wan trying to bring Anakin back from the dark side, pleading with him, begging him to come back to help restore the Republic and Anakin ultimately rebuking him, it would have made the final moments that much more poignant. At least Obi Wan does show some emotion once he's incapacitated Anakin (and Anakin has gotten incredibly messed up in the process). Still, the impact would have been so much greater if they hadn't been essentially mute throughout the battle.

Despite these shortcomings, I will say this -- the wrapup scenes that tie everything to the original trilogy were absolutely fantastic. Maybe it's pure nostalgia, but those made me want to pop in Episode IV immediately after getting home. The final shot of the film, showing Owen and Beru Lars holding an infant Luke Skywalker with the binary sunset and Luke's theme in the background was the most affecting thing in the movie for me, short of the opening fanfare (which I'm sure will continue to give me chills every single time I see it for the rest of my life). Leia's theme playing with Bail Organa first shows her to his wife was wonderful. Padme's funeral hit the perfect notes. Lucas really knew what he was doing here, as did John Williams.

The only scene of the final minutes that didn't quite do it for me was Vader's Frankenstein moment, in which he stumbles out of his constraints exactly like the Frankenstein monster, then screams a very cheesy "NOOOOOOOO!" after learning that Padme is dead. To me, this was even more jarring than Luke's scream in the first Special Edition of The Empire Strikes Back (that thankfully got removed in the DVD release). It took a lot of the audience out of the film, right along with me, because I distinctly heard a few chuckles after it happened. Let's hope Lucas has the foresight to change this when he redoes the movie for the super-duper 3-D holographic edition on BluRay in 2007, since the rest of Vader's "birth" (especially the POV shot of the mask coming down) was just about perfect.

I know it sounds like I'm being really hard on this movie. I did like at least half of it, though. Maybe even more than half. Those were just some of the things that really bothered me and could have been fixed quite easily without changing the pacing of the movie at all.

Stuff I liked? I thought the Anakin/Dooku fight was played exactly how it should have been played. There are those who will complain that it's over too quickly, but I was happy to get some actual banter during a fight, as well as a very important payoff at the end. I could have done without the R2D2 comic relief, granted, but everything in that familiar-looking (think Return of the Jedi) observation deck was terrific. So was the ensuing elevator escape.

Well, General Grievous. I will note here that I knew NOTHING about Grievous going into this film, so I had some confusion as to his coughing and odd chicken-walk. I'm sure I'm not the only one. I was later told that a lot of this is explained during the Clone Wars cartoon. He's an interesting character, but he's introduced too late in the series to have any real impact for me. Still, he's quite the neat visual, and his fight with Obi Wan is entertaining and imaginative.

The scene where Palpatine tells the story of Darth Plaguieus (sp?) is among the best scenes in any of the Star Wars movies, right up there with "I am your father" and Han going into carbon freeze. The entire scene was genius, and showed exactly how good Palpatine was at manipulating everyone to get what he wanted. It also showed just how good Ian McDiarmid is. The dude stole the movie from everybody. He's not quite as good once he's caked in makeup and looking like the Emperor we recognize from the originals, but what he does in the early scenes is pretty amazing, walking the line between dramatic and hammy and knowing exactly when to pull back. He even makes you like the guy and you see why he's really the villain of the films, not Darth Vader. He's easily the best character in the film.

Despite my complaints, I will watch this again, definitely. The parts I enjoyed, I enjoyed enough to watch them over and over whenever the DVD comes out. I will look at Vader as more of a tragic, heartbroken figure (and a guy who got completely suckered by Palpatine) now when watching the originals, and it's interesting to rethink my whole position of spoiling the end of The Empire Strikes Back. At first I hoped that Vader's identity would be left ambiguous, so as not to ruin that film. Of course, seeing the new film makes that point completely moot, and would have robbed it of all the emotional release that occurs. Now I think that the new twist for kids watching these films for the first time is that if they watch them in chronological order, they don't know that the guy who's set up to be the hero of the piece turns into the big bad boogieman halfway through. They did give a good sense of Anakin not giving in at first, and give you enough hope that maybe he'll come back to the light side by then end of the movie. I can see that making a difference in how kids would view it. I'll still have them watch 4-6, then 1-3, though.

The final score? 3 stars out of 4. God, how I wish I could give it more, and actually did the more I thought about it. I originally started with a 2.5, but the power of that last 45 minutes was too much to overlook. This is easily the best of the prequels, and just might be better than Return of the Jedi, which gave in to cuteness far too often for its own good. This movie makes the entire Luke/Vader/Emperor scenes in that movie that much better, though. I guess we'll see what my rankings are once I've seen this one a few more times.

This really marks the end of an era for me. There just aren't any other movies I'd be willing to see at midnight or take a day off from work just to see. This is it. Not sure how I feel about that just yet...

Maki's having a shindig!

Sorry everybody, I am a very bad blogger. This week's been pretty crappy for updates to the blog, hasn't it? I've been busy, though. Along with some late days at work getting ready for the Jacksonville Film Festival, I've been cleaning up my house and stocking up, preparing for a cookout tomorrow! Got some peeps in town who'll be dropping by and spending an afternoon at the Casa De Maki. This, of course, meant that I had a lot of cleaning up to do. A LOT. I still hadn't fully recovered from that whole England trip that I started recapping and then kind of gave up on. Stuff was all over the place. My mail pile from when I was gone was still sitting exactly where I had left it the first night home. My suitcase was still on the floor of my bedroom in the corner. Kind of pathetic, really. I've been cleaning up all week, so now the place is looking pretty prime. You could eat an ice cream sundae off of my floor right now, if you were so inclined. At least, as long as you get to it before the stupid cats do. I will warn you I'm out of strawberry syrup, unfortunately. The cats don't like that stuff. Right.

So I didn't go out today, except to go to the grocery store to stock up on foodstuffs and assorted meats & vegetables. I enjoy going to the grocery store, save for the part where you actually get your groceries bagged and all. I used to do the job back in high school and I know it sucks, but damn, do these people have no common sense whatsoever. I try to help them out by grouping the things as they go down the conveyor belt so that what ends up going down the chute together will hopefully end up bagged together. Today some random bag person decided she was going to help me put my stuff on the conveyor belt, even though that would save me exactly no time because I have to wait for the lady writing a check in front of me whether my stuff is loaded on the conveyor or not. So she just starts chucking stuff on the belt, tossing the (still kinda green) bananas on top of the loaf of bread and all that and generally just doing a retarded job of it. (She was not retarded.) As expected, once my stuff starts going down to the bagger kid, he just throws whatever's near each other into the bags and tossing them into the cart. Here are some of the fun combinations I received today!

• Bananas and lean ground beef. Yum! Nothing like some blood drippings to flavor your bananas, huh?
  
• Potatoes (for making oven fries, rock on) and Glade Plug-Ins Tropical Mist Air Freshener. Maybe he thought the potatoes needed a more tropical-mist-type flavor? Why the bananas didn't get to join them, I'll never know. They might benefit from a tropical-mist-type flavor. You never know.
  
• Arm & Hammer Baking Soda and Publix Brand Hamburger Buns. I guess the baking soda got lonely, since the buns could have gone with my now-banana-indented loaf of Whitewheat Bread (which got its own bag.) Go figure.
• Edy's Grand Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream and Purina One Hairball And Weight Management Cat Food. I think the cat food could definitely benefit from a minty flavor. The mint chocolate chip would not benefit from a tuna-chicken mix flavor, however.
• Publix Brand Fat Free Skim Milk got its own bag. The kid did something right.

Reading that back, I think I have obsessive compulsive disorder. I might, but at least my lean ground beef doesn't taste like bananas when I get to organize the conveyor belt stuff myself. Thanks for the help, lady.

I also purchased a box of Kellogg's Honey Smacks. I have more than enough cereal at my house already, but an angry Samuel L. Jackson on the box intimidated me into buying them. At least I get a cool Star Wars Light-Up SaberSpoon inside. BREAKFAST WILL NEVER BE THE SAME.



It's weird that Honey Smacks are back to being Honey Smacks again. When I was little, they were Sugar Smacks. But then we realized that a healthy breakfast cereal shouldn't have sugar as its main ingredient. Then they renamed them Honey Smacks, but I guess honey became bad for you too, or something. So for a while they were just Smacks, but people must have been like, "what do they taste like, do they hurt like getting punched in the mouth" and so they changed them back to Honey Smacks now. I guess nobody gives a shit about their health anymore, do they? At least they've kept their little frog mascot guy with the backwards hat and the "DIG 'EM" shirt through thick and thin. He looks quite happy, even if Samuel L. Jackson is ABOUT TO CUT HIS DAMN FOOL HEAD OFF.

I need to get more sleep, honestly. Get-together is gonna rock tomorrow. So are the oven fries. Nobody will feel like Mrs. John Lithgow while eating them. I am confident in this.

My latest purchase is...

Hoop Dreams is easily one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. Hell, it's one of the best movies I've ever seen, period. If you have any interest in basketball on any level, you need to go get yourself a copy of this. Now. This movie came out in 1994, and I remember seeing it on the good old JU Channel way back when. It's stuck with me since. The real shame is that it took this long for it to finally make its way to DVD. It seems strange, but the movie seems almost more relevant in today's NBA landscape of high school prospects going as #1 picks (with the resulting monster contracts) than it was in '94.

The thing I like most is that Steve James, Frederick Marx & Peter Gilbert simply let the story develop, rather than forcing the material to work into whatever viewpoint they might have wanted to get across. That's a trap the majority of documentaries I've seen seem to fall into. In the wrong hands, we would only have one opinion about William Gates and Arthur Agee after seeing the film. The filmmakers show them as what they were. Nothing more, nothing less. Some people would see them as inner city kids with no other options and a whole lot of people looking to ride their coattails. Others might see them as tragic figures, denied millions of dollars by a ruthless professional sports system. You might see them as something else. The beauty is that we're given all sides of the story, and left to make our own decisions -- though I will admit that the business of sports and sports agents does not come out looking particularly rosy by the end of this.

If I were a high school basketball coach, my first practice would consist of nothing but sitting the kids down for the full 171 minutes and watching this film with them. True, it's going to tell them that it's possible -- and very likely -- that none of them will play in college. But this is something they need to hear. This movie can drum it into their heads better than I ever could. You know what else it's going to do, though? It's also going to show them that if they do want to succeed and move to the next level, love of the game isn't enough. It's a necessary component, but it's not everything. And sadly, no matter how much drive, no matter how much desire, if they don't have the talent, all they'll have are dreams, and nothing more. It's going to show them that no matter how good they are, and no matter how bad they are, they need to enjoy every single second they play. Because sooner or later it's going to be gone.

4 out of 4 stars. A truly amazing film.

I'll write more about the DVD another day, once I've checked out some of the special features. The commentary tracks -- one with the filmmakers, one with Agee and Green -- will take me some time to get through. I'm looking forward to it, though.

Yes, I'm still alive.

Go back to your daily routine, citizens. Cinco de Mayo didn't kill me, though it did make me put up a pretty much incoherent post. Anyway, since then, I just had a busy weekend and a busy Monday. I did have a great time in Orlando, for once. I guess it helps to have a full schedule of events for the entire weekend or something.

I did see the worst car wreck I've ever seen on the way back to Jacksonville last night. Two completely unidentifiable vehicles looked like someone had decided to tie them in knots or something. It was like a giant monster with a fair amount of dexterity grabbed the front left bumper and the back left bumper of the one car and just smashed them together as hard as it could. The other one just looked like said monster with a fair amount of dexterity grabbed the front and back bumpers and just twisted until stuff started shattering. In the process of dexterous-monster-twisting these two vehicles also managed to knock over a rather large moving truck and took out 3 more cars in the process. It was a mess, resulting in a 3-hour drive that should have been 1:45 or so. Kind of made me glad I was running late, because that accident was fresh. Police and ambulances had only gotten there a few minutes before I drove by. It's all about timing, my friends. Of course, some might say that if I really had good timing I would have gotten by before everything went down and had my short drive instead of way-long one. I call these people glass-is-half-empty cynical sons-of-bitches. They can go to hell.

In closing? I faced evil Cinco de Mayo and the I-4 deathtrap and lived to tell the tale. Do not fuck with me.

Day 5: The Backup Plan, AKA The HMV/Virgin Megastore Megahaul

Sorry this took so long, real life (AKA my friends laziness and procrastination) kicked in. I'm trying to get back on track, but I'll be out of town to visit my mom for mother's day this weekend, so don't hold me to it. Not that it would matter if you did anyway. Sorry. Okay! Day 5! Rock on!

Day 5 was decidedly less sunny than day 4. This was to be expected, but was a downer nonetheless. Originally, this would have been the day I took a train down to Winchester to see visit one of my friends. Alas, he couldn't get the day off from work, so the backup plan was to go see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. This begins at 11 a.m. It's done daily during the late spring and summer months, so you'd figure there wouldn't be too many people mucking up the works, right?

Wrong. The place was a fucking madhouse.



Needless to say, we didn't stick around long. We saw a little bit of the guards playing music and crap, but it just didn't seem worth it to stand in the rain with 3,000 other people just for that. So we moved on, taking one more photo before leaving...



These are the gates just behind the crowds. I guess when you have a giant empire, you can afford to build gold-plated gates like this. Then again, I guess you can do it even when you're just a figurehead ripe for tabloid fodder. Who knew?

Those would be the last pictures I took that day. I wanted to kind of wander and enjoy the city, not really caring about documenting all of it. This would end up being my shopping day. This would also be my "wander around with headphones on, listening to cool music in cool places" day. Try listening to Dead Can Dance's Aion or Massive Attack's 100th Window while walking through an art gallery (preferably one with artwork from the 13-17th centuries.) Listen to Portishead while riding the tube. Listen to some Quantic while roaming the streets. It's fun. It's kind of like how people tell you that watching 2001 is SO MUCH BETTER DUDE when you're stoned or on acid or something. Except my way is completely legal. Somehow, I just made that sound less fun. Ok, you downloaded the songs ILLEGALLY, you rebel, you. Feel cooler? I hope so.

Anyway, I eventually made my way to the Virgin Megastore, which is like a gigantic mecca of a music place in the Piccadilly Circus area. It's got four floors worth of music and DVD goodies. They had a 5 for £30 sale going on, which equates to about $12 a CD. This is a damn good price for over there, especially when you're grabbing limited edition stuff that costs like $30 to get in the US. I promptly took advantage of that deal, though I will admit I took a little TOO much advantage of it. I walked out of there with 12 albums and £85 less than I walked in with. Do the math. After this I went to the HMV to see if there was anything there that I couldn't find at the Megastore, and surprisingly enough, I found 5 more discs that I had been looking for. Even better was the fact that the Another Late Night series was buy one, get one free there. Score! Much better than paying £15 apiece for them. Still not cheap, but about the cheapest I was ever going to find them. Also found a 6-disc downtempo compilation thing that I couldn't pass up for £10. Walked out of there with 5 more albums for the collection and £40 less than I walked in with. Again, do the math. Here's the official list for you to either respect or point and laugh at. Your choice...

• Another Late Night: Fila Brazillia
• Another Late Night: Howie B.
• Another Late Night: Rae & Christian
• Another Late Night: Zero 7
• The Beta Band - The Three E.P.'s
• The Cut Up Boys - The Mash Up Mix
• De La Soul - 3 Feet High And Rising (2 disc special edition)
• David Gray - Flesh
• Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights
• Kid Koala - Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
• Kid Koala - Some Of My Best Friends Are DJs
• New Order - Substance
• New Order - (the rest of)
• Pulp - Hits (UK edition)
• The Quantic Soul Orchestra - Stampede
• Queens of the Stone Age - Rated R (UK 2-disc special edition)
• The Ultimate Chillout Album (6 discs)

In total? $250 spent, 17 albums, 26 discs total. Craziness.

Also went to see a movie that day, since it only seemed right to see a British film in a British theater. I went to see Bullet Boy, the story of a boy whose older brother has just been released from prison and the parallels that begin to appear between the two of them. It was nothing special, and certainly not worth the $19 I spent to see it. Yes, you read that price correctly. It did have a soundtrack by Massive Attack, which is a plus for me. I'll review it for the JAXFIFE site eventually. But then again, we know how good I am about keeping up with my own blog, so no promises there, I'm thinking.

Not the best day, not the worst day, but certainly the most expensive day. I didn't even get into how much food and drink cost me that day. Scary.

Coming eventually (I make no promises anymore):
Day 6: More Timely Info From Maki About The Trip He Took Last Month Already

I have a terrific attitude.

I'd rather watch The Empire Strikes Back. Again. This is what happens when I ask you people to discuss something and you fail to do so. YOU ARE ALL IN BIG TROUBLE NOW.

Crap...

There's a big cinder block on my desk. I'm naming it Writer's. I promise I'll post something again some day. I only have like 6 drafts waiting in my Blogger dashboard, and not a single one of them is even close to being fit for publishing. Sad, isn't it?

As you may or may not have heard, the phrase, "as you may or may not have heard," describes everything in existence, thus making it completely worthless. Discuss.