Who You Gonna Believe, Me Or Your Own Eyes?

A COUPLE OF weeks ago, a friend of mine confessed-- scratch that-- iterated a love for pepper jack cheese. Which is not precisely the inspiration for today's lunch, more of a catalyst, I guess. The purchase of the pepper jack was in advance of several options, not the least might have been a tuna melt on rye with pepper jack cheese, and beyond that, perhaps the Jamaican jerk chicken patty with etc etc. A series of coin tosses lead here: a two-cheese grilled sandwich with curly fries and Ketchupo! Which is working out smashingly.

I like hot stuff. I didn't think I did as a kid, but that was based on a bad experience at the wrong Tex-Mex restaurant in Dallas, back in the 70's, in the days when the movement was all macho-macho, and the goal seemed to be, as near as I could tell, to hurt oneself so badly as to erase any other feelings, emotional or physical, from the psyche. But, after all, I do like hot stuff, and this is a great example. The Ketchupo!(TM) has three different distinct hot sauces (The 3 Cholupa's, and my regular readers will know what those are), and the sandwich is made of premium American cheese and pepper jack, with Plochman's yellow mustard on one side of the bread and mayo on the other. (The mayo makes a suprising amount of difference.) This is one of those combinations where the heat builds, slowly and gently, as the meal goes on, and the creaminess of the grilled cheese mitigates it just slightly, giving the whole thing a funky factor that is out of this world. This is the fourth instance where the Tsing Tao is working perfectly. Think of it this way: it's not entirely dissimilar from a decent Mexican lager, say a Carta Blanca or Modelo Especial. Nice nice.

This is definitley not the movie of the day. It's in heavy rotation on the movie channels right now, and I almost almost got sucked in the other day on the strength of the fact that Damian Lewis aned Jason Lee are in it, but we watched it once before. When it first came out on DVD. The whole goddamned mother-humpin' thing. Here's how bad it was: we watched it thinking it couldn't be that bad, it's Stephen King. And the Wifey had read the book, said it wasn't the BEST Stephen King, but far from the worst. And clearly, it was Stephen King: had alot of regretable psycic powers, childhood alliances brought fast forward to adulthood, malevolent spirits which exist for no particular reason, and bodily functions. In that last matter, it's alot like The Passion Of The Christ with shit and retard jokes.

Couldn't be that bad, but oh, it was. It was so bad, in fact, that we watched the "alternate ending" on the grounds that the ending in the movie was not the same as the ending in the book, and profoundly hoping that it would be better than the ending we just saw. And it was worse. Oh, my GOD, it was sooooooooooo much worse.

So never again. Never, ever, ever, ever again. I liked Damian Lewis in Band of Brothers, but I don't know why in the hell he did this. And I don't watch that damned cop show he's in either. And I will watch Jason Lee in any number of things, up to and including Dogma and My Name Is Earl, but this? Forget it.

The movie of the day was almost Leverage, since TNT was doing a Leverage-a-thon. But that was yesterday, and I couldn't find the proper poster image for it on the web. So the movie of the day is Sneakers.

When I first saw this flick, back in the early 90's, I thought of it as a great, big, what-if of a movie. This, after all, was at the dawn of the internet, when half of the people who knew about it thought it was going to lead to transparent corporate government and an end to global strife, and the other half thought it was going to lead to the governmental equivalent of date rape. But the fact is it's just pretty. It's just terribly, terribly pretty. It's alright that it isn't all that smart. Someone will look out for it. Just because it's just so god-damned pretty. (And never mind that Ben Kingsley can't maintain a Brooklyn accent for any real length of time. We all owe him time off for Ghandi behavior. Right?) As it turns out, they had about five decent ideas about the state of modern espionage (at the time) and they rubbed them together enough to make a reasonable amount of static. Also, they packed it with actors-- Redford, Poitier, Straighthairn, Akroyd-- whom I would pay to watch play tiddly winks. And River Phoenix, who would have to be playing with a ping-pong paddles just to make it interesting, and Mary McDonnell, whom we always refer to as The President, because whenever we see her in anything, we can never remember her name right off, and the only thing we have seen her in together is Battlestar Galactica. (The good one. Or the gooder one, anyways.)

Which brings us to this.

Some of my skater pals have been trying to get me to watch this show for awhile now. The first episode I caught a little of during one of this month's alotment of white nights, so I was not exactly in the best mood. Also, it was the Bilderbung Group episode (which the Wifey, appropriately enough, calls the Build-A-Bear Group). I saw about fifteen minutes of it, during which the schmucks following these heads of state around and trying to pry into their private meetings act suprised when they start getting followed by their highly trained, highly paid security details. (Said schmucks then claimed that the Build-A-Bear Group's big meetings concern thinning out the population by infection and innoculation, which what the fuck!?! WHY. WHY WOULD THEY WANT TO DO THAT? It would mean, chiefly, fewer people to consume the resources they largely control. Idiots.)

Actually, let me just stop there: idiots. The next episode I caught, almost in it's entirety, concerned the search for the Manchurian Candidate. Unfortunately, I know way to much about that shit. The Government cannot modify someone's behavior to the point that they can turn the individual into an unknowing assassin who would forget that they were programmed to kill after completeing the mission. They spent millions, actually more like billions, proving that they couldn't do it. About ten of the CIA's major famous fuck-ups involved them spectacularly failing to control people's behaviors. This includes the guy who was unwittingly does with LSD and, a week later jumped through the glass out of the window of a fourteenth floor hotel room in New York City, to his death, apparently under the impression that he was about to be tortured for the details of a secret mission he wasn't on. And the mentally ill inmates they gave acid and heroin to, in order to see how far they'd go to get more drugs if they stopped handing them out. Much much worse shit than Governor Ventura and his crack squad of exotic dingbats ever dreamed about digging up.

Want more? Alright: the next episode purported to be about how and why the 2012 bullshit might be true. I didn't watch much of it, but the bits I did watch centered around doomsday scenarios propped up by NASA research. NASA has been spewing junk science faster and harder than any other institution on earth since the early seventies. See, after they proved that the farthest away any manned mission could ever go is the moon, they had to start churning out lots and lots of justification for why the government ought to continue to spend the billions upon billions of dollars on them. Per year.

Now THAT's "conspiracy fact."