Have I used that gag in the post title before? If so, ah well. Yesterday was a full day, with many an errand to be run and two parties to attend, not to mention playoff football. The pickem pool continues, by the by, and on wildcard weekend my results were rather mixed: I didn't pick a single victory correctly, but I got the over/under right for three out of four. So far this weekend I'm off to a slightly more encouraging two out of four.
The televisual highlight of the day yesterday was a Colts fan in the crowd who was wearing a home jersey, a Batman cowl painted white, and Hulk hands painted blue. Nice.
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While we're on the superheores tip, two quick follow-ups to my earlier post about the future direction of the Spider-Man movies. Less than an hour after I posted my thoughts on redundancy, I ran across another news item that boiled down to the following: a proven Hollywood director approached Sony about taking on Spider-Man, and already had a pitch including a six-minute version of Spidey's origin, and Sony rebuffed him and insisted on a full-on origin story. Which means any equivocating I had done about the studio heads probably making the wrong decision when it came down to it can be replaced by a lead-pipe lock. So, you know, goddammit.
Also? I was thinking (more) about superhero movies and my preferred model for them, and I recollected a flick which started with the hero in full embodiment of his identity, did a reasonably brief flashback to the origin, and used the two-villain set-up where one villain essentially hires the other, and the hireling gets killed in the end while the shot-caller lives to remain a thorn in the hero's side. Just replace J. Jonah Jameson with the Kingpin and Scorpion with Bullseye and my pitch for the Spidey reboot is basically the 2003 Daredevil movie. That movie is still rife with various mockable inelegancies, of course, but my respect for its structural underpinnings just went up a notch or two. I won't say it's a pity we never got to see Affleck turn that into a full-blown three or four installment franchise, but I can't deny a modest curiousity about what might have been.
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The office in Rosslyn which I am trying to escape (so long as my escape route does not dump me in the Crystal City I.T. Help Desk room) is a secure government facility, which means I need a badge to enter and said badge must be displayed at all times, ad a lot of other protocols. If I didn't have a badge, I would have to be escorted everywhere by someone taking responsibility for my possible impact on national security. You know who doesn't have badges? The office building's cleaning crew. That means that there is a woman in this office, a government employee, who's job duties include once a day (a) letting the cleaning person into our locked office and (b) following the cleaning person as the garbage can in each cubicle is emptied, making sure the cleaning person doesn't whip out the James Bond microcamera or liberate any hard drives or somesuch. I guess in the bottom-line analysis, having someone take time out of their day to babysit the dama de basura makes more sense than background checking everyone who takes what I'm sure is a high-turnover, minimum wage gig. It just seems like a drag. Then again, this particular government employee always smells like burnt patchouli so I can't always muster up that much sympathy for her.
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There are many and varied reasons why I would like to someday become a published writer, but one in particular has been on my mind lately. It would be nice, when people visit my home and get the nickel tour and walk from room to room and see overflowing bookshelves every-freaking-where, to know that instead of thinking "Jeez, what's with all the books?" they were rather thinking "Well, of course. He's a writer."
But until then, it's just this unrealized ambition which can be surprisingly awkward. At the first party I went to yesterday, the host at one point asked me if I had written anything lately. I kind of laughed it off and said not much except this here bloggy-blog. The host's father, whom I had just met a few minutes before, overheard and then started asking me about what kinds of things I write and what the last thing I had written was about and so forth. I know he was just trying to make conversation but it felt like a merciless grilling. Writing more beyond the blog really needs to be my 11th pop resolution.
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