Fat lip

Today, a man didn't get his car towed because weeks ago a comedy club bought several cans of chili and nacho cheese sauce.

Confused? I can explain.

Last night, I ordered dinner at the comedy club. Chili cheese fries. Wanna know something you never hear someone say after eating chili cheese fries? "That was a good decision I just made!"

Fifteen minutes after finishing my meal, I began to feel an odd sensation in the middle of my upper lip. It felt like a mosquito bite, only without the itching pain. It was a tightness in the tissue and some slight swelling. Over the course of the next hour, the swelling spread to my entire upper lip.

My friends and I went out for ice cream, and it helped with the swelling. I went home and went to bed. In the morning, I woke up, the swelling had not gone down. In fact, it was three times its normal size.

When I got to work, I called the clinic to set up an appointment. They fit me in right away, seeing as it was a possible allergic reaction situation. It was determined that it was the massive amounts of MSG in the canned chili and cheese sauce that my lip was reacting to. So, some allergy pills and I was good to go. Lip back to normal size.

When I got home, I rummaged through the cupboard and bagged up all of the foods I had with MSG in it. I decided not to throw the food away, but rather give it to a friend of mine, you know, a friend who won't swell up if they eat it. I pulled up to the house, which was a couple blocks away from the State Fair, and the car parked out front was about to be towed away for parking on the street. I asked my friend if she knew who's car it was and it turned out to be her brother's.

So there. A simple order of chili and cheese sauce leads to a car not being towed. Not exactly the best example of a the-world-is-all-connected zen exercise, but hey...

Not the Heroes I was expecting, but OK...

Quick update on my life: The gas is back on, I love hot water, and everything else is going swimmingly. Now, on with more pressing matters...


NOTE: Do not read the rest of this post unless you have seen the season premiere of Heroes. Spoilers ahead.

Okay, just so I have this straight...

Future Peter shot Nathan, trapped Present Peter in some fat guy, marooned Parkman in the Sahara, and hung around to see things go completely apeshit. Nathan believes he's now an angel, in a character arc that could get really annoying really fast. Parkman thinks he can communicate with a turtle, but it turns out to be an African version of Isaac from season one.

Mohinder discovers the source of the mutant powers in the adrenal gland, makes one syringe of instant hero juice, and has a crisis of conscience. He must choose between testing the formula on himself, or dumping one more syringe in the East River (never mind the fact that the needle could've hit a fish and we would've had a giant, flying, psychic, super-strong, teleporting, rapid-healing mackerel on our hands). So, he injects the formula into his own arm, and now he's Jeff Goldblum from The Fly...drinking sugary drinks by the gallon, climbing walls and setting a world record for fastest seduction/stripping of a fully clothed female character in network television history.

Nikki/Jessica is now Icewoman and has a new personality. No word yet on what happened to her son, who was last seen in New Orleans watching a building burn with her inside it.

Hiro is now a multimillionaire with one job to do: to protect half of a complex formula, which is promptly stolen by a woman whose mixture of unbelievably cute and ethically questionable leads me to wonder if I might have dated her in the past.

Sylar can now heal, having stolen (or co-opted) the power from Claire, in a creepy scene where she's wide awake with her skull cap off. She asks him if he's gonna eat her brain, and his disgusted response instantly kills at least half of the internet chatter about his character. Apparently his method of stealing powers is about as complex as removing a wrenched ankle in a game of Operation. He puts her skull cap back in place and leaves with a file folder containing profiles of the prisoners of "Level 5"

Level 5 is where they put the worst of the worst, and also Noah Bennett because apparently Levels 1-4 didn't have a bed open. So, Sylar strolls right in like it's the Sharper Image of superpowers, kills and steals Bob's midas touch...I'm guessing because his master plan for ruling the world somehow involves upsetting the gold standard.

And Sylar's attempt to crack open Elle's skull resulted in the metaphysical equivalent of plugging an American appliance in a European outlet. This shorted the whole grid and the Level 5 prisoners escaped, including, but not limited to the firestarter, creepy black guy whose powers are supposed to be threatening for some reason, fat guy/Present Peter, and The German...which why is it always that the evil magnetic guy in these stories has to be German? What the fuck did we Germans ever do...oh, nevermind.

Oh, and somehow Nathan's wounds were healed by a figment of his imagination, and Mama Patrelli is Sylar's mother as well.

Which begs the question: Did the writing staff mainline speedballs for a solid week, watching every episode of Lost before they mapped out this season? Let's just really screw with people's ideas of these well-established characters and spend the rest of the season trying to explain it.

In the end, I'll just say that I'm not disappointed, just a little confused. They needed to take this shit in a different direction. Hell, Heroes may be the one show that benefited from the writer's strike. It forced the producers to pull the car into a motel for the night, get rested up and hit the road refreshed in the morning. The only problem is they had a quintuple espresso before getting back behind the wheel, and claim they know a shortcut through the cornfield. There's no way out of it. I'm along for the ride and all I can do is buckle up and pray they find paved road soon.

Out of gas

It's not like I was sitting around the house thinking, "Gee, it's been nearly nine months since I've had a paid service or utility shut off at my place due to situations beyond my control." It's not like I've been taking natural gas for granted. It's not like I did anything to piss off my neighbor. In fact, I never even met her.

But, despite all this, I'm on day four without gas.

Yesterday morning, I had a unwelcome yet effective snap to consciousness when I stepped into my shower for what I assumed was my usual perfect calibration of the water knobs (full blast of hot, quarter turn of cold). In reality, it was ice fucking cold.

I had little choice but to continue the cold shower and wash up. Once out of the shower, dried off and fully dressed, I scrambled around the apartment to find my latest gas bill to make sure I didn't miss a cutoff notice. The most recent one I could find was from last month, which did have a notice, but I could've sworn I had paid it off. I took the bill with me and decided to call the service hotline when I got to work.

I stepped outside and on my way to the car, I saw a slip of paper on the sidewalk with the Oklahoma Natural Gas logo on it. Upon closer inspection, it also had my address on it. It also had Wednesday's date on it. Apparently, I had enough hot water in the tank to let Thursday go by unnoticed.

At work, I called the gas company and checked on the outage. As it turns out, my neighbor had smelled something funny and reported a gas leak. They said the way the lines went through the building that it was possible for my pipes to be the cause of the leak into the other apartment. So, I got shut off, too. They told me to talk to my landlord about when the plumber will be by.

So, I called the landlord. She knew nothing about anything regarding a gas leak. Ooookaaaaayyyy.... The landlord promises to call me back when she knows more.

This morning, another cold shower. I get a call from the landlord and the story gets weirder. Not only did my neighbor detect a gas leak, and not inform me of the problem that could've KILLED ME (!!!), then had the gas comany shut off my service... But she also moved out and skipped out on her lease. According to the landlord, all that remains in the apartment was her couch.

I also couldn't help but notice that the light bulbs in the hallway are missing.

The plumber won't be by until Monday afternoon. Looks like it's microwave meals and questionable hygiene for a couple more days, and I have no one to yell at for the screw-up.

Blade Runner

This weekend was the midnight movie I've been waiting for: Blade Runner. Easily my favorite movie of all time, having watched it at least one or twice a month for nearly twelve years now. And all that time, I had never seen it on the big screen, until now.

My first exposure to Blade Runner was in college, watching a bootleg copy of the theatrical cut at a friend's house. I was blown away by the visuals of the film, but was turned off by the boring as hell voiceover narration throughout the film. When my friend moved away, he sold me the tape for a dollar, and somewhere along the way, it disappeared.

I didn't see it again for nearly a year later, when I was fresh out of college. I was in my first apartment, sans cable TV, and I found a VHS copy of the director's cut at Vintage Stock for five bucks. Good deal, figured it was worth another viewing. Lo and behold, no fucking narration! This film now officially kicks ass!

I wore down that videotape shortly before I upgraded to DVD. It was supposed to be the first DVD I purchased, but the store that i bought the player from was out of stock of the movie. So, Blade Runner wound up being the third DVD I ever owned. I never lent it out, so when it turned up missing, I suspected theft. But fortunately I found a replacement copy at the bargain bin at Wal-Mart. The thing I remember about this purchase was that Son-In-Law starring Pauly Shore was right next to it in the bin, and was selling for a dollar more... Further proof that Wal-Mart is pure evil, when they think that Pauly Shore is more bankable than Blade Runner.

This past fall, with the release of the Final Cut on DVD, marked the fifth and hopefully final time I need to buy this movie, short of when I eventually upgrade to Blu-Ray. I got the four-disc edition, simply because they were sold out of the five-disc edition. No biggie. The four-disc, from what I can tell, has everything but the kitchen sink, which leads me to believe that the fifth disk is, in fact, a kitchen sink.

The Final Cut, in essence, is what every special director's cut should be. It's not a George Lucas hey-see-what-I-did-on-my-computer? redux/abomination. Nor is it a David Lynch you're-gonna-watch-every-frame-we-filmed-Goddamnit edit. It isn't even a Steven Spielberg how-did-this-movie-wind-up-being-shorter-than-I-remember? special edition. No, Blade Runner: The Final Cut was a light touch. Fixing a continuity error here, airbrushing out a stunt wire there, and, of course, adding the go-go dancers wearing hockey masks. They still left in one big continuity error in my opinion, but if you don't notice, I won't talk about it.

When it came time to design the poster for the midnight movie at the Circle Cinema, I took my time, spending close to 26 hours doing the illustrations, with Blade Runner playing in the other room while I worked. Once the artwork was done, I put the movie away for a while, vowing not to watch it again until I see it one the big screen. That was two months ago.

The movie played both Friday and Saturday night, and I was first in line both times. I saw it Friday with about seven of my friends, with a couple of them having never seen it before, so afterwards I had to answer some questions. Saturday, I saw it with Tony and Jenny, who are two of my favorite midnight movie buddies. They not only forgive me for completely geeking out over these things, but often join me in the geekness.

Every time I see this movie, I spot something new. I don't know if ti's poor memory retention, short attention span, or if the film truly is that richly detailed, but there's always one little thing that I discover each time. Seeing it on the big screen, with theater sound, I noticed quite a lot. Little bits of dialog that sounded drowned out on my TV came through loud and clear. And for the first time in my life, I realized that I need to upgrade to HD, because I saw things on the big screen that I would never had noticed on my crappy TV.

There's just something about seeing your favorite movie on the big screen for the first time. It made my Twizzlers taste sweeter, the Cherry Coke a little fizzier, the seat a little more comfortable. My life is richer having experienced this.