I’m not talking about excessive gore; the Internet and modern movies and TV have completely desensitized America to that. What I’m referring to is entire movies - or at least extended scenes - that are filmed by what I can only assume is a chimpanzee who has been heavily drinking. I suppose it all started with The Blair Witch Project, but more recently I made the mistake of seeing Cloverfield on the silver screen. The plot was great and I think it would have otherwise been a good movie, but I was so nauseous by the end that I’m fairly confident that had I stood up to leave early, I would have vomited on the person in front of me. What’s worse is that I’m equally as confident that had one person tossed their cookies in the theater, it would have set off a chain reaction and caused the theater to be quarantined. Which, it turns out, brings me to the first movie I’ve ever walked out of: Quarantine.

I’m normally not a fan of the horror genre, but this at least looked intriguing from the commercials, starred and actress who is great in Dexter, and my wife and our friend, Ms. Quarter, both wanted to see it. So we went and it started off interesting enough, but even though it was supposedly being filmed by a “local news” camera-man, it just continuously got more shaky and nauseating. About a half hour in, just as the actual action in the movie started, the three of us were already so dizzy that we just got up and left. Jessie even managed to talk the manager in to free passes.

Going to the movies is already expensive enough, not to mention the added cost of any kind of snacks or drinks, so the least the industry can do is warn you about crappy nauseating camerawork so I don’t have to waste my time and money on a movie I’ll just end up walking out of. Hollywood, I’m begging you, if you want any more of my money stop trying to make me spew buttered popcorn on your other paying customers.

Dear Smoker Driving In Front Of Me,

Don’t worry, I’m not about to go off on a tirade about how what you do should be made illegal. I respect the rights that you have in this country to smoke cigarettes and for the most part I in turn tend to avoid places where it overly affects me, namely poorly ventilated bars and restaurants. The exception, however, is when your smoking habits directly endanger me, without my choice. I’m not referring to second hand smoke, because I know you’re going to come back at me with studies funded by the likes of Philip Morris “proving” that second hand smoke is harmless. What really gets to me is when you feel that the absolute best way to dispose of your cigarette butt is to toss it, still lit, out your car window. In case you didn’t pay attention in high school physics, the airflow around your moving car will cause what you throw out it to be sucked behind your car and thus ends up going directly under my car, still lit. When I call your cigarette “lit”, think of it as a nice easy way of saying “your cigarette is on fire” and, despite the inexplicably slow development of alternative fuels, cars do still run on a very flammable liquid called gasoline. Given, the chances of you throwing your butt directly under a car that happens to be leaking gasoline are slim, but the chances of it blowing over to the side of the street in a dry pile of leaves and starting a fire or leaving a burn mark on my car are much higher.

You may now be wondering what I propose you do with your cigarette butt if you longer simply throw it out the window. If you look around your vehicle, you’ll probably find a little drawer that you’ve likely been keeping your extra change in. Turns out, that was actually meant to be an ashtray. Try using it for its intended purpose (Note: If you don’t smoke, keep using it for spare change). If you happen to drive a newer car that does not have an ashtray, swing by your local Target, K-Mart, Walmart, or whatever other store you have in your area and pick up one of those handy cup holder ashtrays that they offer. If, like me, you prefer to shop online, Amazon has a nice variety of ashtrays for your cup holder.

I hope that you consider what I have said above and I look forward to being able to drive around without having lit cigarettes thrown at my car.

Sincerely,
Everyone Driving Behind You

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is reporting today that a local synagogue, Congregation Bnai Zedek Chabad in Kenosha, had its two Torah scrolls stolen. The article states that the Torahs had a value of forty to fifty thousand dollars, but the true value of a Torah to any synagogue goes far beyond any monetary value. It has a strong spiritual and sentimental value that far outweigh any price tag. Who in their right mind would break in to a religious institution (of any kind) and steal what is essentially the most religiously, spiritually, and historically important item. It is absolutely disgusting that someone would do this and I hope that the person or people who stole these Torahs is caught and feels the full force of the law. My hopes and prayers go out to the members of this synagogue and I sincerely hope that they are able to get their Torahs returned to them with no harm done to the scrolls.

For more information on the Synagogue, the stolen Torahs, and to donate to help them raise the funds for a new Torah, visit Chabad of Kenosha.

The weather here in Milwaukee is finally to the point where I am ready to head outside, light up some charcoal, and grill up some meat on my Weber One-Touch Gold. I’m even going to be trying some new things this year. We got a bottle of honey bbq from Buffalo Wild Wings that I will be cooking burgers (and probably chicken) with and I found some recipes for home-made bbq sauce on the ‘net that I’m eager to try out. Hungry yet? Anyone who knows me is more than welcome to give me a call and come over for some barbeque.

Windows decided to take a complete dump on me today and I ended up spending the last 6 hours fixing my computer. Thankfully, I was able to pop in a live cd of Ubuntu 7.10 that I had lying around which allowed me to back up everything of value on to my slave drive, but as is always the case with Windows, nothing went quite how it was supposed to. I had to reinstall it twice before I could get it fully working again and now I’m running through a seemingly endless series of Windows Updates. I suppose I should be thankful that my hard drive didn’t fail or anything like that, but it sure is a pain in the ass to have to deal with pile of crap that is Windows.

It’ll be nice when Jessie and I get new iMacs and I can work with an operating system that was actually written well. At least when something goes wrong with Mac OS X I’ll know it was something I did and not some random corrupted system file that just happens to prevent the computer from fully loading, sending it in to a spiraling descent of reboots and system errors.

It’s been a long time since I last posted anything here so if you were at all curious: Yes, I’m still alive. My online life has been going quite well. Digitally Wise has been quite active lately, which is always fun. There are some great conversations going on, so anyone who doesn’t already post there should pop in and participate. Anyone, especially a reader of this blog, is more than welcome. As of right now, this blog and Digitally Wise are the only two active websites I really work on, but there’s a super secret new project that I’m working on and I think will go over very well. Some of you may already know what it is, but for the rest of you, the only thing I’m willing to divulge at this point is that if you are one of my Jewish readers, this is for you. I’ll post more information as I feel it is available, but the official launch of the site is still at least a few months away and there will be an official press release once it is ready.

Offline, or as you may prefer to call it, “Real Life”, has been fantastic. I’ve got a terrific wife, an awesome cat, and we live in a great house. We recently went on a little mini-vacation with some friends to Door County, which is always extremely relaxing and fun. We even spent a few hours cross country skiing, which I haven’t done since I was much younger and I had forgotten how fun it is and how beautiful Peninsula State Park is in the winter covered in snow. It is definitely something we’ll do again next time we’re up there after a good snow. I could probably write a nice long post just about Door County, so I’ll save that for another time.

On to other exciting news (at least for me): Jessie and I purchased an elliptical machine yesterday. We had done a lot of shopping around, seeing what places like Sports Authority, 2nd Wind, and Play It Again Sports had to offer, but we ended up buying from the first place we went to, Northern Home Fitness. They were extremely knowledgeable, helpful, and gave us a great price, well below the MSRP. I’ve never been a big fan of going to a gym and working out, but I do really like the exercise I get from an elliptical and having one in our home will be great. I’m out of shape compared to where I would like to be, but my ultimate goal is to use it for 1/2 hour a day, at least 5 days a week.

That’s just about all I have for you today, but I’ll be blogging more often than I have been, so you can look forward to more soon.

Maybe you know him, maybe you don’t, but for two years Jessie and I lived in the shittiest apartment ever (different story) with Garrett Fields. He’s a good friend, always a lot of fun, and this past weekend he married Cassie Roseen. The wedding took place in the rose garden at the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum and it was absolutely beautiful. I’ve known Garrett since our freshman year of college when I lived almost directly above him and I can honestly say that I don’t think I have ever seen him happier than he was that day.

We obviously don’t live in Minneapolis anymore, so we drove up from Milwaukee Friday night and stayed over night at the AmericInn in Chanhassen on Friday and Saturday night. Because we were there a day early and the wedding wasn’t until late afternoon on Saturday, we had time to meet up with my friends and former co-workers Dylan and Gwyneth (Mr. Awesome & Gwenchicken at Digitally Wise). We drove up to Rosedale Mall and met them at a new restaurant called Granite City. It was great food, great beer, and, obviously, great to see them again after almost a year of living in Milwaukee.

The day after the wedding, right before we had to drive back to Milwaukee, we were also able to meet up with Jessie’s former co-worker and good friend, Joy, at their favorite cafe near the school Jessie used to work at. As always, Joy was fun to spend time with. We then had a 5 or so hour uneventful drive back home where Ishtar was both excited to see us and pissed that we had left her for the weekend (Don’t worry, her “uncle” Matt took care of her, she’s just spoiled).

So I just saw 300 tonight (finally!) and it was rather awesome (although Jessie will beg to differ), but that’s not what this post is about. This post is about what happened immediately after the movie ended. Here I am, waiting to exit the theater, when some middle aged pompous ass walks up to me and says something along the lines of “That was nice how you were crinkling that bag or whatever during the whole movie” in a rather condescending voice. I replied “Huh?” and he responded, “It was really rude”. Now mind you, I didn’t have anything in the movie. I finished the water we got before the movie even started and had no candy or anything that was capable of making a crinkly noise. He continued to be an ass about it and seemed pretty confident that it was me that had been doing whatever it was he was hearing, even though he had been seated a few rows behind me, so I told him to go screw him self, walked out a bit, turned around, called him a “f***ing prick” and flicked him off. I sincerely hope that he went home and cried because of his shattered ego, but something tells me he still thinks he was correct in his actions. Maybe if I had been some punk teenager messing around with a bag of skittles the whole movie he would have been in the right, but I was pretty intently watching and enjoying the film and didn’t have a single thing on me that could make noise, other than my cell phone, which was off.

Honestly, I’m still in a little bit of shock. Jessie and I now own a house! We haven’t moved a single thing in yet, but it’s officially ours! We just spent about an hour signing a huge pile of papers and all but emptying our savings account, but it was worth it. The house is truly great and nicer than I had expected we would be getting. Now it’s time to start moving all of our crap over there, but don’t worry: I’m sure I’ll be posting plenty more about it in the future.

I know I haven’t posted about this yet, but if you’ve run in to me in person or even online lately, you probably already know that Jessie and I bought a house. Ok, so we haven’t yet; the closing date is this coming Friday. I can’t even begin to describe how excited I am on multiple levels. Just for starters, we’re finally done with shitty apartments. Above and beyond that, I’m excited for all of the things involved in owning a home, both good and bad. So, why is this going to be a long week, you ask? Because I have to wait until Friday! Honestly, I can’t wait. Sure, it’s going to more or less drain our savings account, but it’s worth it.

Here’s a picture of the front of the house, click on the picture to see more: