April 30th, 2007 by aarondietz

With $4 gallons about to spring up everywhere, how can anyone afford it?

April 26th, 2007 by aarondietz

First, thanks to all who checked in with their own opinion on the film. Remember: all opinions are valid until they are paid for. Now, please enjoy this paraphrased (edited) list of reviews. My short review is at the very bottom.

Positive reviews:

Aaron (not me, a different Aaron): I liked it because it wasn’t the major huge happy triumphant ending.

Ally: I liked it because the desperation was real.

Claudine: The characters were great and it required no thinking.

Dabi: In a film world filled with stupid pandering towards the lowest common denominator, Little Miss Sunshine caters to viewers who want a lot of intelligence in their humour, with a healthy dose of profanity mixed up.

Fantastic H: The characters are people that you wish you knew in real life and when the movie ends it is sad because you know you will miss them.

Jeremicah: Irresistible character building.

MickeyBlowTorch: Alan Arkin’s character was priceless. I don’t know too many elderly people kicked out of nursing homes for snorting heroin.

mr whatever: I like pretty much every movie that doesn’t completely suck. The Matrix sequels sucked, but they didn’t totally and completely suck, there were robots and kung fu and flying people in those after all. and I’ve
watched those more than once. Little Miss Sunshine didn’t suck near to that level (acting, dialogue, story, all superior to the MAX), but then again I haven’t watched it that many times. I attribute that to the fact that there weren’t any robots or kung fu or flying people in Little Miss Sunshine….. Here just use this: I LIKE MOVIES! YAAAAAAAY!

Peregrine Flounder: Those characters…all have a life that seems to extend beyond the…screen, a rarity in movies these days. Everything about it was just so . . . cute…. Smart too. The performance at the pageant had me laughing and crying at the same time.

Pie Is The New Toast: I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the humor was great in it…. I could relate to Olive and her father….

Rachael: I loved it. Because great character driven ensemble movies reign. Because Abigail Breslin is adorable. Because you love each character in spite of their glaring faults. Because of the ice cream scene. Because the focus of Steve Carell’s eyes says more than his words. Haha, because the sound of the bus horn going non stop sounds just like my sister cat Bezor.

Redd: The characters were interesting and well-developed. All the actors nailed their performances with a great mix of humanity and humor.

Slacksploitation: Alan Arkin, Steve Carell were fucking hilarious as adult freaks…. I also really liked DeVotchka’s soundtrack…. Thematically, I like the idea of authentic people sticking it to the “pretty” or “normal” people…. The people were weird, the soundtrack was quirky and expansive, proust is used — it’s a good film.

~..: LOVE LOVE LOVED IT!!!!!

Not as positive reviews:

Desi: I enjoyed watching it, but I wouldn’t consider it a favorite movie. I really identified with the teenage son though.

Kerri Lynn: *in the voice of Randy jackson* It was just okay for me, dog…. Seriously, I think I would say it was a ‘cute’ movie. But wasn’t as good as I’d hoped it would be. So I did not love it or hate it.

Sophia: It seemed like it was trying to be off-kilter and indy…. I like to feel there is a point to a film…. Mostly, I felt it was trying too hard.

Somewhat ambiguous reviews:

AC for life!: I suppose I enjoyed the drug addict grandfather.

Adam: Aaaaaaaron, YOU are Little Miss Sunshine. And that is all.

Lauren: Liked it in the movie theater, as the audience really got into it. Watched it again on DVD and couldn’t figure out why I liked it the first time.

And now, finally, my review:

Aaaaaaron: In short, it was a triumph of style over substance. And I prefer substance.

April 17th, 2007 by aarondietz

The Secret: stupid feel good bullshit designed to make people delusionally happy (at least, delusionally happy enough to spend their money).

I can tell you why it’s stupid, because I have the book that the movie is based on. I checked it out from the library. And to further point out how stupid it is, I don’t even have to read a word of the book to trash it. All I need is the copy on the cover.

The book claims that a secret “has been passed down through the ages” and that now this book will reveal it to you (for $23.95, if you’re not friendly with libraries). Read on: “As you learn The Secret, you will come to know how you can have, be, or do anything you want.”

The book supports this claim by stating that this “secret” was known by “some of the most prominent people in history”. It lists them: Plato, Galileo, Beethoven, Edison, Carnegie, and Einstein.

This is how we know this book is already contradicting itself. If these men (apparently the secret has only been known to men) could have anything they wanted, why did Einstein struggle for most of his adult life to come up with a Unified Theory of Everything (he failed)? Why was Carnegie’s reputation permanently damaged by the Homestead Incident? Why did Edison have to try thousands of different filaments before he got his light bulb working? Why was Beethoven deaf? Why was Galileo persecuted for his heliocentric model of the universe? Why was Plato unable to stop the unjust trial that resulted in Socrates’s death?

In reality, these men suffered, just like the rest of us (okay, maybe Carnegie didn’t suffer that much, but the others did). I’m all for positive thinking–it helps people. It has helped me, even. But when positive thinking works, it has more to do with accepting what you have than trying to “have, be, or do anything you want.”

Besides, this book has people like Neale Donald Walsh contributing to it, a man who claims to have conversations with a god that called George Bush I a “visionary.”

“Life is pain…. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

-From William Goldman’s The Princess Bride

April 15th, 2007 by aarondietz

CIA AGENT JONES: I want tamari almonds to disappear.

ASSISTANT: From the Capitol Hill area? Or all of Seattle?

CIA AGENT JONES: I don’t want Aaron Dietz to be able to find tamari almonds anywhere in Seattle proper. He loves those things.

ASSISTANT: Got it.

CIA AGENT JONES: And get rid of baba ganoush, too. It’s okay for restaurants to have it; just get rid of all those easy-to-make baba ganoush mixes they sell at the grocery stores.

ASSISTANT: But sir–our records indicate that Aaron Dietz only uses those once every six months or so.

CIA AGENT JONES: That’s especially why it will perplex him. Besides, I checked his Google Calendar and he has a “Falafel Night” with the significant other coming up. I know he’ll want to make baba ganoush.

ASSISTANT: It shall be done.

April 12th, 2007 by aarondietz

Six facts about a subject I know too much about (idea stolen from Dabi who stole it from others):

1. Wyatt Earp lived to be 80 years old without being grazed by a single bullet. Once, after an exchange of gunfire in Southern Arizona, he thought he had been hit in the foot. On further inspection, he found that his boot had been hit and a piece of the boot had been pushed up into his foot, but the bullet never touched him.

2. Wyatt Earp’s lifelong friend, Bat Masterson, became a close friend of Teddy Roosevelt during the 1890s and they continued to hang out during Roosevelt’s presidency. Teddy Roosevelt, of course, led the Rough Riders in a silly little war that Stephen Crane (author of Red Badge of Courage) reported on. Stephen Crane later moved to England where he befriended author Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness). There is an unconfirmed tale somewhere of Joseph Conrad touring Brigham Young’s compound in Utah and reflecting on Young’s polygamous lifestyle: “It is like the loneliness of one marriage, magnified.” As Brigham Young led the Mormon Exodus across the West, they wintered in Nebraska, near where a young Allie Sullivan was growing up. Allie’s childhood friend, Amelia, went with the Mormons and eventually became Brigham Young’s 25th wife (and supposedly his favorite). Allie herself went West later, though not as a Mormon. She married an adventurous man named Virgil, who happened to be a brother of Wyatt Earp.

3. Wyatt Earp had four full brothers and one half-brother. The five brothers from the same mother looked very similar, and they tended to settle in the same towns in the old West throughout the 1870s and early 1880s. They also tended to get involved as law enforcement officers. Many citizens of Dodge City, Tombstone, and other towns couldn’t tell the brothers apart, so there was an odd mystique about the Earps: when you got in trouble with one of the Earp brothers, all of a sudden you saw that same brother all over town. It was like he was hounding you, making sure you didn’t mess up.

4. It is rumored that on one afternoon, Wyatt Earp and Charlie Chaplin had dinner together (where they may have talked about the Alaskan Gold Rush, a subject they both knew much about, as Earp participated in a minor post Klondike rush, where he met author Jack London, and Chaplin made his film, aptly titled The Gold Rush). Charlie Chaplin may have even done his famous dinner rolls dance for Wyatt. Chaplin, of course, produced films and met Orson Welles because they traveled in the same circles. Welles’ film, Citizen Kane, was a financial nightmare because of William Randolph Hearst’s brash interference with its distribution (the film made fun of Hearst’s life, right down to his pet nickname for “pussy”). William Randolph Hearst was the son of mining magnate George Hearst, who befriended Wyatt Earp in Tombstone. They may have bonded over ice cream (yes, Tombstone had ice cream in 1880–it was very cosmopolitan).

5. When Wyatt Earp was working as an advisor on John Ford’s first Westerns, young Marion Morrison would get him coffee and listen to his stories. Marion Morrison, of course, later changed his name to John Wayne. John Wayne would one day later in his career be rude to a waitress named Joyce, who would later work with Aaron Dietz (that’s me!) at the Denver Public Library. In the year 2000, Aaron Dietz shook Ray Bradbury’s hand while Bradbury said, “God bless!” Ray Bradbury was a pen pal of Tom Mix, the early Western movie star. Tom Mix knew Wyatt Earp from the movie industry, but he also became a pen pal and close friend of Wyatt. Mix was a pallbearer at Wyatt Earp’s funeral.

6. After the gunfight near the O.K. Corral, Wyatt Earp, Virgil Earp, Morgan Earp, and Doc Holliday faced an inquest to determine if there was enough evidence to try them for murder. They hired a good attorney named Tom Fitch, who had once edited a literary journal called The Weekly Occidental. One of the The Weekly Occidental’s regular contributors was Mark Twain (who some say is the pre-incarnation of Kurt Vonnegut). Mark Twain used to hang out in Nikola Tesla’s lab in the 1890s. If you believe some conspiracy theorists, Tesla once looked out across the deck of a particular ship and spied Albert Einstein being ushered about by military personnel. Einstein and Bertrand Russell wrote the Russell-Einstein Manifesto together. Bertrand Russell was a friend of Kurt Vonnegut’s, who died yesterday.

I saw Kurt Vonnegut speak in person at the Tattered Cover in Denver. He was everything a person would expect him to be.

April 10th, 2007 by aarondietz

I’d really like to leave Starbucks alone, but they keep pulling some pretty ridiculous bull honkey.

To be fair, they have made improvements–since I started picking on them about 18 months ago, they’ve doubled the percentage of Fair Trade coffee that they buy (from 3 to 6 per cent of their total supply). So, they are improving. They can show people statistics that support this fact. Yet, they continue to rely on smokescreens and flashy phrases, rather than simply saying, “We’re not as socially responsible as we want to be in the future.” When corporations use P.R. smoke and mirrors, I get suspicious and downright hateful.

The smoke and mirrors:

I’ve been told that “Starbucks offers Fair Trade coffee everyday.” While this is technically true, it is not true within the context of my question (”When is Fair Trade coffee brewed in my local store?”). I wasn’t asking about the pounds of Fair Trade coffee beans you can buy (which are indeed offered every day). I wanted to buy Fair Trade coffee brewed on a day when it is their special “Coffee of the Day”. Several friends in this effort have reported getting the same feedback when asking about Fair Trade coffee.

When I emailed them to find out when Fair Trade coffee would be the “Coffee of the Day”, they wrote back (without quoting my email–they don’t like to encourage an open dialogue): “Starbucks is committed to brewing Fair Trade Certified coffee as part of our ‘Coffee of the Day’ program.” Problem solved LOL!

A friend of mine asked about Fair Trade coffee and was told by a Starbucks store manager, “All our coffee is fairly traded.” Apparently, the manager doesn’t expect consumers to know the difference between a standard (Fair Trade coffee) and a statement of opinion (”our coffee is fairly traded”).

Starbucks, why must you insult the intelligence of your consumers?

Note: in case you’re wondering what I did with that Starbucks gift card of mine…. It was too difficult to figure out when I would be able to purchase Fair Trade brewed coffee, so I spent the $50 gift card on a coffeemaker. If anyone has some fun stickers I could use to put over the Starbucks logo, I’d love it if you sent them my way.

April 8th, 2007 by aarondietz

The following blog takes place in a fictional world based on an event that happened last December. Maybe.

It is 4:30am.

Three very drunk men decide to knock on the door of my neighbor across the hall.

She opens the door.

They serenade her mercilessly, murdering such things as harmony, tempo, and music.

I hear the whole thing from my apartment (cringing).

Finally, I shout: “Hey, knock it off! People are trying to masturbate here!”

This does nothing.

April 3rd, 2007 by aarondietz

Thanks to el capitan for offering some mega mega awesome assistance that I fortunately didn’t need in transferring some files off of my dead laptop. He convinced me to do it myself, ultimately saving me hundreds of dollars. Thanks!

And in other news, I’ve been invited to write for subREVOLT, a pretty impressive site for people that are cool. My first piece for them is up right here. Make sure you check out their Worst Comic Ever series. Problem solved LOL!