i know this is a stereotype that’s often joked about, but in my experience (most recently this evening in an affluent part of town) it’s too true. and of course this isn’t all black women, or even the majority of them. but if i’m watching a movie and some lady’s talking to her friends, her phone, or to the movie itself, i can usually guarantee she’s black. the kicker is that unlike most friendly people that i could politely ask to be more quiet, the few times i’ve tried to confront an obnoxiously loud black female in a movie theatre, all hell breaks loose. she starts screaming at me about how i can’t tell her what to do and then just proceeds to talk even louder.

this evening i watched wanted with some friends after dinner and the movie was really entertaining. thankfully there was so much constant action that it drowned out this dumb bitch’s voice, but when there was dialogue, she was just gabbing away. i can’t imagine she was following the story, and her distractions were making it difficult for me to as well. the theatre was so packed that i couldn’t get up and move, and per past experiences decided not to incur the wrath of her, her friend or her boyfriend.

maybe i’m just getting old and cranky, but this is just another reason why i have a nice tv and often just wait for the movies to come to dvd where i can enjoy them in peace, without some brat kicking my chair and some bitch asking her nextel, “where you at?!”

last night i was watching a disturbing documentary on bbc america called my secret female body. the story followed the life of a girl that felt “trapped” in her body and decided she wanted to instead be a man. she began taking male hormones, which caused her to grow facial hair, get a deep voice and stop having a period. but she/he had big breasts that she had to tape down every time she went out. the hormones eventually brought her d-cups to b-cups, but that still wasn’t enough so she went to have a double mastectomy.

when she/he went for consultations, they blurred out her boobs, and after the surgery, they didn’t blur them out anymore. so that got me to thinking… when is a boob a boob? usually, on tv they can show all the cleavage, side, upper and under boob they want, as long as there’s no areola or nipple. but what about when a woman gets her breast tissue removed and still has a nipple, is that really no longer a boob? i mean because of the skin and swelling, they still looked like a-cups, and it’s still a female nipple, so how is that not still a regular, ole’ boob? either way it was disgusting, and for all practical intentions now just moobs, but clinically they were still boobs.

even worse, she/he now wants to get a penis installed. they make it out of pieces of your forearm. they didn’t get into too much detail about it since she/he will have to wait a few years for the psychiatric evaluations required to do this type of surgery, but the one point they glossed over that i was dying to know: will it work?

i got this in the mail today. it almost makes me want to change my auto insurance.

thank god it’s finally friday. The week has been weird for me because i’ve been jet-lagged and because taka’s still in japan (she has a friend’s wedding to go to on Sunday and comes home on Monday). While I was there last weekend, everything was so busy that we had little time to enjoy ourselves so I’m glad she decided to take the extra week.

Anyway last night I had steaks, beers and played poker with the boys till almost 2a, so today I’m feeling the pain. This is gonna be a long day.

for those of you that watch ninja warrior (sasuke) on g4, you might appreciate my feeble attempt at this mini sasuke course they have at muscle park in odaiba. these 4 components are usually in the third round of the sasuke competition.

the propeller bars were stupid easy, all upper back. the cliff hanger was easy for the first third of the stretch, but to get to that second level? you need to do a one handed pull-up with your left hand, with only an inch of space to hold on to. seems impossible. watching the video, i think i could’ve done the jumping bars, if i wasn’t so tired and used a different technique. i should’ve done a full pull up first and then just flung the bar up, instead of trying to do it all in one motion. the sliding bar was easy to get across, but if you watch the show, you know many a competitor failed where i did… i’m not sure how i should’ve handled that section. but from here on out, all my gym workouts will be back/bi’s and wrists.

ninja warrior is on g4 every day at 6p and 9p

when things are good, they’re good, and when they’re bad, things can be miserable. on tuesday, taka and i flew to sfo to catch 1 of any 6 different flights to japan or korea (which is just a hop away) to attend taka’s sister’s wedding in fukuoka. the flight from lax to sfo was uneventful, ballin’ in first class, but sfo to japan was another story. for 5 hours we continuously were bumped off of flight after flight. early in the day we started drinking a beer for every flight we missed, so after the last flight departed without us, we were feeling not only defeated, but drunk.

our backup plan had been to stay in san fransisco and try for the same set of flights the following day. however after being beaten so badly and with most flights for the next day already almost full (and being drunk), i opened my wallet. turns out a pair of roundtrip tickets to japan, 14 hours before you want to leave when most airlines are completely full is kinda expensive. in this case “kinda” is a euphemism for “are you fucking kidding me?!” but these are the things you do for family. we both hadn’t been back to japan since our wedding, so it would’ve seemed pretty disrespectful if we didn’t show, regardless of how good of an excuse we had and we’d both been looking forward to this trip for a while; lord knows taka was deserving of a vacation.

so as i sit here blogging away in the most expensive economy seat ever sold, i vow to never again fly standby to any destination where my presence is required. standby can be great if you have a few days to waste and plenty of backup destinations, but a raving, screaming bitch when she has a bad day.

(i actually wrote this in the plane about a day ago and just now found a chance to upload it here in a small internet cafe in ginza)

last monday in all my sickness, i opened my laptop to watch the live blogging of the unveiling of the new iphone. only about a year after the first one came out (and about 6 months after i got mine), rumors were flying about what features the new device might have. i have to say i was pretty caught up in the moment, especially when i heard the pricing started at only $199 (the original phone started at $499).

but now that the dust has settled and i’ve had time to think it over, i really don’t see the point in upgrading. there are really only 2 new features in the iphone v2.0: 3g, which purportedly makes web browsing about 2-3x faster, and built in GPS. the design is pretty much the same, with thinner edges, but thicker overall. i really only browse the web to answer the random bets that i have with ben and eric, and i have gps in my car which is the only place i’d ever use it, so what would i be paying $200 for? on top of that, the 3g iphone requires you buy a special 3g wireless data plan, which is $30 compared to the current $20 plan, plus it doesn’t come with the 200 bundled text messages that the original plan has, so that’ll be another $5 for 200 messages; $15 more total/month.

there’s a lot of small things that could’ve sold me on the new iphone, like 2 way video conferencing, a2dp bluetooth support, flash support, a faster processor, or mother fucking cut-and-paste, but yeh, the new phone doesn’t really have anything that i can justify spending $200 + $180 extra a year on. but i’m a conspicuous consumer, so we’ll see what happens.

all through the nba finals, there’ve been commercials for a new game show on abc called wipeout. it’s a ridiculous competition that involves crazy contraptions and insane obstacle courses and actually looks pretty funny, except it’s a blatant ripoff of most extreme elimination challenge on spike, which were overdubbed episodes of a japanese game show called takeshi’s castle. mxc was funny because the two american announcers that were overdubbing the japanese show poked at lots of cultural differences in an amusing way. this new show has the same format, but it’s american announcers overdubbing americans and poking fun at their american-ness. i’m sure the show will still be kind of amusing, just ’cause people getting fucked up always is, but c’mon abc, make me laugh with something original.

what bothers me even more is that they’re making an american version of the BBC show: top gear. i think at least 25% of what makes this show funny is that they’re british and they do things differently than us. they call the hood of a car a “bonnet” and the trunk “the boot.” the other 75% that makes the show great is the cast. jeremy clarkson and richard hammond are irreplaceable. and i stand by my constant assertion that top gear is the best show on television, regardless if you’re into cars or not.

BURBANK - June 16, 2008 - Television and radio comedian Adam Carolla, champion rally and drift racer Tanner Foust, and TV construction guru Eric Stromer, will lead NBC’s pilot of the international smash hit series “Top Gear.” The production will begin later this week.

Produced by BBC Worldwide America, the U.S. version of the hit franchise will mirror the UK show’s irreverent humor and camaraderie between the three presenters, epic races, outrageous stunts and challenges, unique celebrity guest participation and eccentric methods of testing cars.

adam corolla? *sigh* i give this show 5 episodes tops. since the original show is on the bbc america channel, and since britain and the us have pretty much the same cars, and most importantly since the british can get away with way more shenanigans than a network tv show ever will, i see absolutely no point in ruining the good name of top gear.

and i’d tend to agree, but ben has faith he’ll get it running again. i always hang out with my dad and he was busy with his friends today, so i went up to la to pick up ben and take him to downey to pick up his car where it died on him last night. it’s just been turning off on him, and i’m sure he’ll post his freeway and tollbooth stories on his blog, but yeh, when we fired it up this morning, it was making an awful clicking noise. we figured we’d just drive it slowly back to his place, but a about a mile down the road it died again, so we pulled into the parking lot of ozzie’s diner somewhere in the city of commerce, called AAA and ordered a sandwich. AAA showed up early, some scary mexican dude loaded the altima onto the truck and took it back to ben’s place.

after we got that taken care of, we then went down to lakewood mall (which was pretty nostalgic since that was me and ben’s stomping grounds back in the early 90’s) and watched the happening which was a movie so terrible it was enjoyable. then ben hooked up with his folks for a father’s day dinner and now i’m at home watching the lakers trying to stay alive. i love adventure sundays.

here are some thoughts about being sick as i look back on this miserable week past:

• promethazine + codeine = cough-free psychosis
• promethazine + ephedrine = anti-nausea and appetite suppressant psychosis
• promethazine is an anti-psychotic
• there are 4 ways to loose weight: diet/exercise, weight loss drugs, being too sick to eat, and hanging out with people fatter than you (a combination of all 4 has led me to loose 10 lbs in the last month)
• humidifiers really help control a cough, especially at night when the air is cold and dry. taka says it makes her feel like she’s on vacation somewhere tropical?
• having a wife that takes time off work to take care of you is wonderful

so during this super shitty cold i had lots of free time and ended up watching lots of movies. instead of trying to give a review of any of them, i’ll just rank them in order of a combination of enjoyability/good movie-ness:

• no country for old men
• charlie wilson’s war
• there will be blood
• the bucket list
• the golden compass
• over her dead body
• untraceable
• pitch black
• semi-pro
• cliff hanger
• alien vs predator requiem
• meet the spartans

while watching all of these movies, i either had a fever or was coked out on promethazine + something combo, but the first few were really good and the last few really, really bad.