Matt turned 23 today.  And Raghu asked for an update.  So I thought I’d share.

Matt really likes to do graphic design stuff.  And he’s really good at it.  So when he found out his dad wanted to start doing photography part-time right around Christmas, Matt decided that creating a logo set for his dad would be the best possible gift.  What is a logo set exactly?  As far as I know, it is when you make a logo for someone, and then make a bazillion different iterations of it.  Like a large version, a small version, an inverted version, I don’t know.  Matt apparently got up to over 300 different logo things for his Dad.  I’m not nearly as good, though, so my birthday gift to him only made it up to about 40.

To add some context: Matt’s middle name is Hunter, and he self-admittedly almost chose to go by “Hunter Strom” when entering college.  Also, a lot of people confuse his last name, “Strom,” with the equally awesome yet far less nordic last name, “Storm.”  We felt that “Hunter Storm” would be a great name for the anchor of a weather show.  Without further adieu, here are some sample brand identities for Matt’s future spin-off business, Hunter Storm Action Weather:

Basic logo, normal size.

Inverse, Small

Bolt Image, Large

Bolt Inverse, Tiny 

Mutant Image, Full Size (There’s a MEGATRON size too, but that’d probably crash my internet)

The greatest thing about awful weather: that one shining day in February where it’s sunny and 53 degrees out.

The greatest thing about neglecting a haircut for months: highways with the windows down and the moonroof open.

Two people complained to me in the past four days about working for more than 50 hours this week.  My work hours don’t bother me.

My computer is still a complete piece of trash, my camera stopped holding a battery charge today, and I still have to kill myself every month to wrap up selling ads in the magazine.  And everything is just fine.  The things a little weather, and some soul food music, can do.

To prevent this from being my most somber post to date:

1) I bowled a 174 a week and a half ago.  Six strikes in a game.  What the hell!  Here’s an image.

2) And here’s a counter image.

3) I wish I could link you, but the Malcolm in the Middle Bowling episode is nowhere to be found on the internet. But you already knew how I felt about that one.

I’m sure I’ve written about this before.

I don’t believe in the standard form of New Year’s Resolutions.  Set a goal to complete for an entire year?  It’s a monstrosity.  Impossible.  No human being with a proper supply of laziness and dearth of attention span should be capable of keeping a promise like “work out every day,” “eat vegetables every day,” or “fight lions every day” for an entire year.

So I like to break it up into a month-by-month regime.  Could I read a book for 30 minutes a night for an entire year?  Pfft.  Something will come up.  But can I muster it for a month?  Man, I’m only two weeks away.  I can do this.

Ideally, I’d love to be able to take on a project like this every month, year-round.  I’ll usually run out of steam by like April.  At which point, though, I’ll have accomplished three New Year’s Resolutions, instead of failing at one.  Ha!

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This year’s January resolution was to stop using an alarm clock.  And in fact, for the past 31 days I’ve been relying solely on circadian rhythm to get me up at an appropriate hour.  I’ve read and been told multiple times about how disruptive the alarm clock is, and how it’s fairly rotten for your health to be regularly jolted awake in the middle of the wrong part of a sleep cycle.

I can definitely say that going alarm-less has its perks.  Waking up is fairly pleasant, now!  Sometimes I’m a little late, sure.  (Good thing I’ve got a really rotten boss to answer to.)  But typically, I’m no more delayed than I’d otherwise be if I had hit the snooze button a thousand times.  And there’s really a special feeling to waking up and lazing in bed for a bit before getting on my way.  The kind of thing you typically experience on Sunday at 2pm, when you wake up after first falling asleep at 6am after a silly amount of partying or eating junk food and playing video games the night before.  It’s not totally the same, knowing that I in fact will have to carry out some work in the near future.  But it’s close.  And in this case, quantity (every day!) more than makes up for quality (those few extra, extra minutes of sloth).

My biggest problem with the program is the weather, really.  St Louis has had its fair share of weather binges these days, and when it’s cloudy outside for a week straight, I find it far more difficult for my system to tell the difference between 8:00am and 9:30.  Then again, I probably just hate the weather and am just looking for more excuses to hate it.

Overall, I think I’m going to stick with the clock-less program.  I’ll still keep an alarm handy – but only for special occasions.  And even then, I suspect the novelty of waking up to an alarm will outweigh the misery of its cacophony.

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Next month I’ll be working on physical training.  I’m teaming up with my friend Ian, and by the end of the month, we hope we’ll be able to do a set of one-arm pushups [Update: Craig’s joining us!].  I may not have access to a gym and be able to squat 300 pounds (for now)…but I think the one-arm push up is a fairly reputable feat of strength.  Given that I’m already loosely in shape and have a high propensity for push ups, I think we’ll be able to accomplish it.  Here’s the video we’re following, if you want to tag along, too.  It’s corny as hell, fair warning.

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As for March:  In case I forget, or can’t come up with something cooler, I think I’m going to shoot for a whole month without using Social News Aggregator sites.  See ya Digg, Reddit, Popurls, Delicious.  So long, the-unproductive-half-of-the-feeds in my Google Reader.  At least, we think.  For now.

Have you got any thoughts?

To follow up on my earlier post on Avatar (and like my post on the underpants bomber, it seems I’m a step behind the crowd on this topic), I’ve broken up my internal system for grading movies into three simple tests.

1. The First Name Test. Unbelievably, Bill Simmons beat me to the punch and wrote about this very notion just yesterday.  From his article:

If you saw “Invictus” already, ask yourself these questions: Can you remember the name of one guy on South Africa’s rugby team other than Damon’s character? (I bet you can’t.) Can you remember the name of the coach? (You definitely can’t — we were apparently expected to believe this team coached itself.) … Did you learn ANYTHING about the team’s one black player, who should have been just as compelling a character as Pienaar? (Nope. I can’t even remember his name.)

Very simple: I’m looking for a compelling character with an engaging and unique story.  And call me crazy, but if I can’t even remember the name of the main characters, I find it hard to believe that the movie was worth its salt.

Excellent example: Old School versus Wedding Crashers.  Do you think (assuming you’re not a Vaughn/Wilsons/Stiller/etc. fanatic) you could name any of the central characters from Old School?  You should have answered Frank (Frank the Tank!) fairly easily.  Possibly Mitch (Mitch-a-Palooza) and Blue (you’re my boy!), too.  Now, how about Wedding Crashers?  I mean, I know Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, and Christopher Walken were in the movie.  But didn’t they effectively play themselves?

Old School passes.  Wedding Crashers, even if it didn’t have the soppy, cringe-inducing, awkward sequence at Vince’s wedding near the end, is a bust.

Do note – the first name requirement isn’t necessarily black & white.  Consider that, in Fight Club, we go 85% of the movie before realizing that Tyler Durden’s name is Tyler Durden.  How fantastic, realizing upon watching Fight Club for the first time, that you had never learned Tyler’s name!  Sometimes a movie is strong enough on its own that the first name test can slide (and we’ll get to this).  Or you’ll find the character memorable enough thanks to all of his other defining qualities that his name gets lost.  Think: Brad Pitt’s lead in Inglourious Basterds.  You know who Lt. Aldo Raine is as a protagonist via his distinguished mustache and delightful enunciation “naht-zis,” even though I feel his name gets muddled up (probably due to the very same heavy accent).  Heck – I had to look the name up on IMDB, and I only just saw the movie yesterday.

Double note – Bonus points for characters that I can identify with on a personal level.

For posterity’s sake, I’ll give this test a weight of two points.

2. The Callback & Re-Watchability Test. Many possibilities: First, I love it when a movie plays such fine attention to detail that it’s able to turn seemingly irrelevant details from earlier in the movie into significant plot devices.  Think: The ending to Citizen Kane (I really hesitate to post a spoiler here).  Or the ending to The Girl Next Door.

Second: I love being able to watch a movie for the second time, and pick up revealing details along the way that make repeated viewings just as enjoyable.  Think about Bruce Willis’ interactions with people throughout The Sixth Sense.  Or consider Back to the Future, where things happen like the name of the mall in 1985 changing from “Twin Pines Mall” to “Lone Pine Mall” after Marty knocks over a pine tree in 1955.  Great Scott!

Third: It’s of utmost importance that the movie have some line in the script that I can quote or riff about with my friends.  Again: Great Scott!

Back to the Future passes.  The Sixth Sense gets half credit, because Shyamalan had to go through a montage to highlight all of the subtleties (and should lose its half credit at that, after his success with Sixth Sense led to so many other awful works).

For posterity’s sake, I’ll give this test a weight of two points.

3. The Suspended Disbelief Test. Far and away the most important test, and if you really wanted to, you could make this test on its own the metric for evaluating movie quality.  To pass here, a movie must simply occupy my undivided attention for its entirety.  Shouldn’t that be easy?  Isn’t the whole purpose of movie-watching to escape from present reality?  I’d say so.

The problem is: nobody’s perfect.  Not every director can catch and correct every single minute detail, or contour his work to my perception of what’s reasonable.  An exceptional movie will completely ace it.  An equally exceptional movie might blow it – but I’ll be so caught up with everything else that it won’t matter.

Perfect example: The Dark Knight.  Cracked.com hits the nail on the head, and I’ll quote:

[The Joker plans] “First, we find two empty buildings. Without the cops noticing, we’ll secretly sneak in hundreds of drums of explosive liquids, and wire all of them to explode. Next, we’ll orchestrate an attack on the convoy transporting Harvey Dent. This will involve blocking busy streets, blowing police helicopters out of the air and launching missiles at the armored car. All of this will be done, not to kill Dent (though that could happen at any moment) but to cause Batman to intervene so that he will throw me in jail.

Then, while the whole town is on alert, we go ahead and have our henchmen kidnap both Dent and Rachel Dawes and strap them in with the bombs in the two abandoned buildings. Then I’ll send Batman after one of them, knowing that this will result in Rachel being killed and Dent being a certain distance from the explosion as to become grotesquely injured and disillusioned. Then I’ll blow up the jail without accidentally killing myself. Gentlemen, it couldn’t be simpler.“

Did it ever occur to you how obscenely asinine this plot is?  Even once?  But what’s more important: Does it even bother you now? No way! Who cares! Everything else going on the movie was so far-and-above absolutely freaking phenomenal, that knowing full-well how unrealistic this part of the plot was doesn’t affect my opinion of the movie in the slightest.

Without a doubt, Dark Knight passes.

For posterity’s sake, I’ll give this test a weight of seven points.  (What, like you didn’t expect this to add up to eleven? Details! Test 2! Stick with the program!)

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Some quick examples:

The Dark Knight: 2 (The Joker!) + 2 (“Where are they!?”, “Why so serious?”) + 7 (see above) = 11/11

Back to the Future: 2 (Doc!) + 2 (“Great Scott!”, “Hello, Butthead!”, Lone Pine Mall, ad infinitum) + 7 (without saying) = 11/11

Old School: 2 (Frank the Tank!) + 2 (Frank the Tank!) + 5 (The valedictorian just likes to carry a voice recorder around? Curious.  The frat doesn’t get in trouble for a brother dying at a frat party? Who cares!) = 9/11

Wedding Crashers: 0 (everyone’s playing themselves) + 2 (I don’t love the movie, but I’d settle on it if I was stuck channel surfing) + 0 (What happened to crashing weddings? Shouldn’t the title be “Weekend at Christopher Walken’s house? And again – the wedding scene at the end is horrendously contrived and nausea-inducing). = 2/11

Avatar: 0 (Stereotypical angry military guy with scars!) + .5 (I thought “Daisy Cutters” was funny, but that’s only really because I thought it was some kind of silly expletive, and not a military weapon) + 0 (Unobtainium? Papyrus font? Armored-helicopter-piercing bow & arrows? The protagonist asking the natives to unitedly help his sick friend after their home, king, and half of the population was just nuked to hell?  Nobody else was put off by any of this??) = 0.5/11

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Two other notes:

1. When applicable, test scores can overflow their alloted weights.  But overall score never goes above eleven.

2. A perfect score isn’t that hard to come by (and shouldn’t be!).  Nonsensical to nit-pick at details and percentiles and such, and wonder whether Shawshank Redemption was better than The Godfather.  There’s my wheelhouse of personal favorites, there’s good movies, there’s mediocre movies, and then there’s Avatar.

I think the most important update is quite simple and straightforward:  We went bobsledding in Jamaica.  Seriously.

Remember these guys?

This called for an immediate addition (and subsequent subtraction) from my bucket list.  Suppose I could call it here, but for kicks, let’s dabble a little more.

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I realize I told a lot of people I would be going to the Bahamas this break.  Pardon my haphazard attention to detail.

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Passing through security on the way out of the country, I had this thought:  Isn’t it silly how we still have to take our shoes off to be put through the x-ray machine?  Have they found one dangerous shoe yet?  Richard Reid sure managed to ruin things for everyone.  Then I thought:  Wouldn’t it be grand, in some last-ditch effort for humor while on my deathbed, to lace some explosives into my jeans and catch a flight, thereby forcing everyone to remove their pants in the same jolly arduous process?

Of course, upon my return I found out about the underpants bomber.  He’s not only beaten me to the punch, but has gone a step further into his undergarments, and has even apparently convinced the TSA to implement a whole slew of new security measures that miss the point entirely.  What a poor sport.

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By the way, anyone buying the story about the bomber’s parents calling the US government prior to the attack is an imbecile.  How many phone calls could the CIA receive every day in regard to things like “my son is going to put explosives in his underpants!”?  And if the government is to take every called-in threat seriously – why even bother crafting and implementing elaborate bomb schemes?  If you’re Captain Terrorist, why not simply hire a team of enthusiastic telemarketers? (Relatedly – boy oh boy, am I going to be on some kind of government watch list once this post goes public.  Maybe you will be too for reading it.  Sorry.)

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Also on the plane ride over:

Alyssa: What language do they speak in Jamaica?

Josh: Jamaican.

Alyssa:  Is that really a language?

Josh: Yah, mon.

…I kill myself sometimes.

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I finished off two books over break.  Here are some thoughts –

Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball: A bit polarizing for me, considering my high opinion of Bill Simmons, and low opinion of the game of basketball.  (Just noticed this, by the way – my blog currently ranks 4th in Google for the search string “basketball sucks.”  That’s damn impressive.)  I always thought basketball was simply a matter of which superduperstar could dunk the ball the loudest and most frequently (among other silly rules and techniques).  Turns out, I didn’t really understand what Simmons calls “the Secret.” I won’t ruin it for you.  The revelation wasn’t earth-shattering, but I’ve got a little more respect for the game now.  A sliver.  Pending further review – it’s in your hands now, LeBron.

Tom Hodgkinson’s How to be Idle (via Kevin (thanks!!)):  A perfect book to read while on a vacation in which one’s sole purpose is to do nothing.  Simply because I got to implement in practice nearly all of Hodgkinson’s recommendations of how to enjoy doing nothing.  Sleeping late, sitting in bed, enjoying a hangover, long lunch breaks, you name it.  One quote I particularly enjoyed: “There is no fun in doing nothing, when you have nothing to do. (Jerome K. Jerome)”

…Which of course reminds me – I’ve got tons of crap to catch up on before heading back to work next week.  Happy holidays, everyone!

Almost forgot, my last post was the 100th post published on this blog.  Apparently I have lots of things to talk about.  I always thought I was more vapid than that.

To celebrate, I’ve turned public a new page on the site: my bucket list.   It looks like I’ll be very busy for a long time.

By the way, thanks for reading and following my nonsense, for whoever’s actually out there reading.  It’s nice to know that you’re there.

Here’s to a hundred more.

-J