Happy Halloween!!!

See, it's easy to put a simple costume together.
Bet he had all of this just lying around the house.

Measure of Me

So, the dullness that is my life continues (thus the lack of posts here on my blog). But times are interesting at work.

* My GM announced she is leaving the company, after 15 or so years with Borders. However, she's not leaving the book industry, just going back to being a DM for a Christian Book company. We also got a new DM for our region, after our last one was fired earlier this month. Since his firing, we've all learned about how piss poor the SoCal region is doing -we seem to be the redheaded step-child of Borders. Also, the GM for Riverside is also leaving next week, which proves how much damage the previous DM did the area and how much work is needed to make this area shine, though I'm guessing the damage is done.

* For the first time in a long time, I agreed to do an overnight shift on Sunday to set-up the holiday stuff. Mostly, the reason I said I do it was because last years crew did a shityy-ass job. So I'm hoping to correct this year; sort of do it right the first time mindset.

* The fate of Borders, by the way, is still not set. It will be an intersting holiday season to say the least.

Happy Halloween all and welcome back standard time.

And less we forget, the Day of The Dead is nearly here.

Peace out.

Ummm

Candy Everybody Wants

Cover for Under the Dome

This weekend

Nothing spectacular, this weekend. Had a quick Frontier Guard shoot on Saturday, was in and out of studio in two hours. We have a bit longer shoot on Tuesday night, which I'm already dreading. I stopped and had lunch before going home and then spent about two hours at Starbucks reading Stephen King's Under the Dome.

Today I went to Disneyland, now all decked out for Halloween. It was pretty crowed, with this weekend being the unofficial Gay Day. As typical, the bears where there early while the twinks showed up at around 1. In some ways, I wanted to be with them, all dressed in red shirts; to fit in. But there is also a part of me who does not want to thrown into such a stereotype.

Argh.

Been on Live Journal checking all the comments about Borders. Seems there are a lot of bitter people working for my company. I posted a few comments myself.

Borders is doomed. Ha!

So, this is Fall?

Fall officially started on Tuesday. It reached 113 that day here. It was 112 on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Suppose to be as warm tomorrow and just a few degrees cooler on Sunday. I love California for its pleasant winters. But like in Chicago when spring arrives in March and its still in the 20s, you get really depressed when fall arrives here and its still blistering hot outside.

Sometimes it just makes me want to cry.

Books: Star Trek: Assignment: Eternity by Greg Cox

For a number of years during the 1990's, I collected almost all of the Star Trek books that came out. 99.9% of them, I never read. They sit now in box's in my garage, awaiting a fate I don't know.

Still, the above novel was published in 1998, and it was one I did not have (or if I did, I've lost it). So, I ordered a used edition. Why, may you ask, did I do this? I've always liked the TOS episode Assignment: Earth. That 1968 episode was originally planned as pilot for a potential spin-off. It featured Robert Lansing as Gary Seven, a mysterious human working for aliens who come from the future. Kirk and company use a gravitational slingshot around the sun and time travel to 1968 Earth for historical research (this time travel plot device was alluded to in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home). Suddenly, the Enterprise intercepts a highly powerful transporter beam from a thousand light-years away and a man dressed in a business suit materializes on the pad. He carries a black cat with a diamond collar. He converses with his cat, Isis, then introduces himself to Captain Kirk as Gary Seven.

That episode also featured an appearance by Terri Garr, who played Roberta Lincoln, a young woman who thought she was going for a job interview only to become entangled in Seven's plans.

Anyways, it was a cute episode that never went anywhere. So in 1998, Greg Cox revived the character for the Pocket Book Star Trek line-up. The novel also include many humorous references and inside jokes alluding to TOS, TNG, DS9 episodes, and the TOS movies, as well as references to some popular 1960's and 1970's television series not related to Star Trek.

The plot of the book has a Romulan traveling to the future and assassinates Spock in 2293 during the Khitomer Peace Accords (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country). Gary Seven's colleague, Supervisor 146 (a.k.a. Septos) alerts him, and he and Roberta Lincoln travel to 2269 to stop the Romulan and save Septos.

Cox would continue his take on Seven and Roberta in his two volume novels The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh (2001/02). Those I've yet to read, and have recently gotten used versions of them.

Pirates IV gets a title; based on Tim Powers novel?

Walt Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook made several major announcements about upcoming Disney films during an address at the D23 Disney fan expo in Anaheim, including the name of the upcoming fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which will be called Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides, which is due in summer 2011. Johnny Depp showed up in full Jack Sparrow regalia, in character, disturbed by the presence of a talking frog at the earlier Muppets presentation (who return The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made!).

The title begs the question of whether the fourth film is based upon fantasy author Tim Powers 1987 novel On Stranger Tides.

Powers novel is about puppeteer John Chandagnac, bound for Jamaica to recover stolen money from his uncle, who becomes Jack Shandy after pirates attack his ship and force him to join their crew. Shandy's struggle to accept his new life, even as Blackbeard and vodun magicians whisk everyone away to dreamlike lands where the Fountain of Youth itself awaits.

Tim Powers, born in New York in 1952, but relocated with his family to Southern California in 1959 has admitted in the past that On Stranger Tides tale was inspired by Disneyland's Pirates of the Carribean ride.

Books: This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

In a pitch perfect take on the family saga, Jonathan Tropper’s side-splitting This Is Where I Leave You is often funny as it is heartbreaking.

We learn, as Judd Foxman’s narrates, is not having anywhere near a perfect few months. Soon after discovering his wife in bed with another man -Judd’s obnoxious, popular radio personality boss - he learns of the death of his father. Faced with returning to his family and home, his future ex-wife compounds the problems by announcing she’s pregnant with Judd’s baby.

With this news, Judd returns to his home town of Elmsbrook where he and his dysfunctional family plan to sit Shiva - which surprises Judd, as he knew his father did not have a religious bone in his body. So, for the first time in years, the Foxman’s are together for seven days following the funeral. In the same house. Like a family.

There’s Judd’s mom, Hillary, is a psychiatrist and the bestselling author of Cradle and All: A Mother's Guide to Enlightened Parenting. "Predictably," Judd notes, "my siblings and I were screwed up beyond repair." Also, there is his sister, Wendy, who has three kids younger than 6 and a husband who works in hedge funds and pays more attention to his BlackBerry than to his wife. Bitter Paul, the oldest, is the partner with their dad in the family sporting goods store, and remains angry at Judd for his failure at a baseball career. Then there’s Philip, the youngest and “the Paul McCartney of our family: better looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead.”

The novel is filled with some wonderful, very sly dialogue about family and death. It’s laugh-out-loud brilliant and I found many passages matched my life, including “Sometimes it’s heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they’ve become. Maybe that’s why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.”

Anyways, by the end of the shiva, Paul has one arm in a sling, Philip has a broken hand, Judd has a split lip, Wendy hasn't slept in days and Mom has had a serious falling-out with her lover. And to Tropper’s credit, the comedy is never glib and not everything is resolved by the end.

Glenda Beck and the sorta-lame-ass version of what he thinks is the truth

You know, Glenda, you're becoming more and more crazy as the days go by, now finding menace in every shadow and every relief. You’re a pathetic propaganda machine for the Conservative Right. You and the rest of the Kool Aide drinking crowd grow desperate everyday to show a bunch of non-thinking idiots that some how you have the inside info on everything. You have no credibility and speak no language any rational human being would say.

Glenda Beck is a psychotic monkey who will tilt the world -along with the other cronies of Right and Faux News - into another Civil War. It's your ultimate goal to bring the collapse of America and set up a regime built and conceived on the notion that only religious folks should hold the key of knowledge and all power.

And while I would never stoop so low as to ask God to smite you down for just being a douche bag, I kinda hope that you'll see the light.

Until that day happens, you’ll never be more than a sad loser, a nobody. You’re a narcists, a clown in an expensive suit, who needs some sort acknowledgment to exist.

Candy Everybody Wants -Celebrity Edition

David Henrie

Zac Efron

Austin Butler

Preview of The Venture Bros. Season 4

Books: Retail Hell: Confessions of a Tortured Sales Associate by Freeman Hall

This book is for anyone who works in retail. And its for anyone who shops and wonders why most retail employees hate you. Author Freeman Hall details the life of a retail slave, one who has to put up with an endless parade of people who live by the mantra that the customer is always right (a fallacy created by the retail stores themselves. I’m with Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David when he says most customers are wrong. And are probably assholes. I’ve always found that living by that slogan day in and day out is a miserable way to run a company. It seems unfair that abusive people will and should get better treatment than nice ones).

Anywhoo, Hall’s hilarious rant on customers, customer service and working for The Big Fancy - a probable combination of Macy’s and Nordstroms where he used to work - hits many spots. As an aspiring screenwriter, Hall’s dose of customer insanity will remind anyone of David Sedaris and ultra hyper-reality in which he lives.

For some, they’ll say his stories are absurd, that the situations in his book could not happen. Hell, after 12 years of working with Borders (and add on 22 years in the book business and 29 years in retail overall), I can tell you stories about catching three men having sex in the men's bathroom, or the ones shooting up in the stalls; of hearing a story in my old store about a teenage boy completely naked -for whatever reason - in our bathroom. Then there's the story of me cleaning up a trail of wet, sloppy poop from the front of the store to the back. Yes, what we do for the unforgiving love of our customers.

So, what stories he tells are far from his imagination.

Interspersed, he tells his tale of coming to LA to become a screenwriter, and how working for The Big Fancy is crushing that dream. All of us know that our off days are truly not ours and even though we plan to grand things when we get those days off, we usually fail to do it, because exhaustion usually gets the best of us.

And while other jobs -ones outside the service industry - can be soul crunching, for some reason retail is worse. It’s all about numbers, quotas and reaching a higher quarter than the previous (even though, theoretically, along with the law of averages, is something not possible.

Anyone can quote leadership gurus like John Maxwell and Peter Drucker, but the reality of retail -and of Freeman Hall’s book - is that while the customer is always right is a good idea, in reality it’s a poor excuse to let people screw you up and down the month.

And who gets blamed for poor sales? Not the slumping economy, surely. Nope. It’s the guy, the girl behind the counter who gets blamed. I mean, how many times do we have tohear if we just sold $5.00 more bucks worth of merchandise, we would’ve made plan?

Books: NERDS: National Espionage, Rescue, and Defense Society by Michael Buckley

Despite being a title for the young, Michael Buckley’s (The Sisters Grimm) new series is a comic treat, as fifth graders become secret agents, ala James Bond.

Combining all the excitement of international espionage and all the awkwardness of elementary school, NERDS, features a group of unpopular students who run a spy network from inside their school. With the help of cutting-edge science, their nerdy qualities are enhanced and transformed into incredible abilities. They battle the Hyena, a former junior beauty pageant contestant turned assassin, and an array of James Bond–style villains, each with an evil plan more diabolical and more ridiculous than the last.

There is much to like about this novel, and you can tell Buckely is enjoying himself. It's a nutty, sort of cousin to CN's The Venture Bros. series. The Hyena is the best, and her backstory is just brilliant. The villain Jigsaw reminds me of Hank Scorpio from the classic Simpsons episode You Only Move Twice.

Look for it September 1

Books: Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan

The final book in the Riordan’s Percy Jackson series is action packed from page one to its conclusion. The majority of the novel takes place in Manhattan, as the forces of Kronos and his Titans head towards The Empire State Building and its 600th floor where Mount Olympus resides. Percy, Annabeth, Grover and the rest of the campers at Camp Half-Blood come face to face with the meaning of the prophecy that started the series and traitorous Luke’s past is finally revealed. We also learn the fates of all as the Clash of Titans comes to a close.

While I think this is the best book in the series, I also felt that Riordan made it all too easy for Percy to defeat Kronos. I sensed that Riordan painted himself into a corner with his plot -which sometimes happens when dealing with a first-person setting. It was like he knew the only way Percy could figure things out was to cram a whole lot of dreams with all the exposition. I feel, somewhat, cheated that Percy could not figure it out himself without the dreams revealing it.

Then there’s Luke. While I had hoped that the kid was just a spy in the house of Kronos, his absolution rang sort of false, and reminded me of Harry Potter again.

Still, those are small quibbles to what was a funny, often clever series that also was history lesson on Greek myths. And while this was the final volume, apparently Riordan will return to Camp Half-Blood sometime in the future.

I’ll be waiting.

Candy Everybody Wants

John Hughes, writer/director and the voice of 80's teens, dies

As a writer and director, John Hughes, who died today at the age of 59 from a heart attack, found an ability to communicate to teens in the 1980s. His sharp-eyed look into their lives was a rarity in the age of Porky's and other somewhat nefarious teen comedies that proliferated the 80s like stale perfume. With such films as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Some Kind of Wonderful, he gave new insights into their lives rarely, if ever explored, and offered looks into their social habits.

Other great films included Pretty in Pink, National Lampoon's Vacation, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the Thanksgiving classic Planes, Trains and Automobiles and the Home Alone franchise.

"He was such a great writer who created so many enduring characters for film, both as a director and a writer. His real gift was in creating these identifiable characters," actor, writer and comedian Steve Martin, who starred in Planes with John Candy, told CNN. "The script for 'Planes, Trains, and Automobiles' was the best script I had ever read," Martin added. "I asked John how long it took to write it, he said, 'I wrote it over the weekend.' The weekend. That shows you what he was able to do."

Like most prolific writers, he turned out some duds, such as Curly Sue and She's Having a Baby, but he could still save them somewhat with his sharp dialogue and great catch phrases. Even the uneven, heavy FX movie such as Weird Science (a personal favorite) still had some great lines in it.

He also did wonders for my home town of Chicago, were most of his films we set and filmed. Who cannot forget the parade sequence in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, with star Matthew Broderick singing Twist & Shout?

Hollywood did not make films for teens like he did before the 1980s and they've not done such a great job since he stepped back - he was spending more time with his family, maintaining a functioning farm in northern Illinois city of Harvard, where he supported independent arts.

He was a writer who understood the written word and how to make it work in a film, but he was also an important voice for teens and young adults during a decade that altered how young and old interact.

A sad passing indeed.

Books: Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Battle of the Labyrinth

With penultimate volume of the Olympian saga, author Rick Riordan ramps up the suspense and action, as Percy Jackson and his friends must battle more Greek monsters, meet more plot twists and prepare for what is bound to be the ultimate battle between the half-bloods and the Gods.

With Battle of the Labyrinth, Riordan continues to re-create the old Greek myths with clever, modern turns. This novel mostly focuses on Daedalus, the famed inventor who created the Labyrinth that housed the Minotaur (that Percy battled in The Lightening Thief) and who’s son Icarus, flew too close to the sun. The story is also about seeking absolution for past sins and understanding how, and why the world works the way its does. Labyrinth also continues the theme of betrayal and the cost of power with friendships.

Now on to the finale.

Palin: What a crowded nation she must rule in her mind

Sarah Palin walked out on her job over the weekend, and now plans, as she says, "with this decision, now I will be able to fight even harder for you, for what is right and for truth.”

You betch’ya.

The, per her usual suspect style, went on to take a swipe at the media for attacking her and said they should be nice to new Alaskan Governor Sean Parnell (cause the “new governor has a very nice family, too, so leave his kids alone"), “So how about in honor of the American soldier, you quit making up things.”

Which is ironic, considering the conservative side of politics has cornered the market on making things up. But, to be fair, so has the liberal side. But the conservatives seem to think making things up (an old Ronald Regan chestnut, where if he said something untruthful three times, it some how became truth), to scare Americans with ludicrous threats that the gays are recruiting your children, that President Obama is not an American, that said president is tilting the world into Socialism (something I’m convinced Palin does not know the meaning of without looking it up on Wikipedia) is the only way to regain the power they let slip away from them.

And even if you believe that politics is merely a pendulum, swinging from conservative to liberal every few years, it does not erase the fact that making up lies is what conservatives are truly about.

Palin’s departure, and her rambling three-day Palin-lollapalooza goodbye tour, proves anything is that the women is at odds with reality. In the crowded nation she rules in her mind, she believes she is doing the right thing - abandoning her state in the middle of a term. That she now has some “higher purpose” to move forward with, because, well being a governor of Alaska did not feed her all consuming narcissistic nature.

And, perhaps not surprisingly, she still has mind-altered fans: "I will tell you one thing -- if we get a woman president, let it be her. She is a real woman. She knows what a woman is supposed to be. She is pro-life. She is pro-family. She is pro-woman," said Jon Eric Thompson, who attended the Sunday picnic in Fairbanks.

Seeing through her fog of reality is me. I have no issues with her being a woman, or a mother or what ever the Right will through at the nay sayers. I may call her crazy (and I do believe that), but she’s dumber than a box of hair. Crazy and dumb is a potent mix that her supporters seem to embrace. Screw being smart, screw even being an intellectual. All she thinks she needs, it appears, is a bunch of people as crazy as she is to think she could be our President.

Jebus in a pita pocket.