links for 2007-06-25

• This GODDAMN kid needs to get off my LAWN!!
  bah! rock & roll music!!
  (tags: nirvana nevermind oldmangrumpus kidsonmylawn)

I’s gonna be RICH!!!

I got a 419 scam letter via the actual mail today, which is fucking crazy.  I can’t believe this would pay out based on return rate vs cost of postage/printing/etc. 

This one’s from Singapore, and the gist is, a wealthy patron WITH MY SAME FAMILY NAME has died and left no heirs.  The letter writer thinks he can get his hands on the money (he works for the bank handling the estate) provided I indulge in some fraud with him.  I come forth, claim to be the long lost heir, and give them a bank account to transfer the money to, and then he & I split the riches and go our separate ways.  Of course, once I give them my bank account routing info the only transferring that takes place is all of the money I have in the bank being transferred to an offshore account run by the scammer. 

Greedy idiots apparently still fall for this one all the time, but it’s usually conducted via email, and I’ve even received a few phone calls claiming I’ve won special grants from the government, etc, if I’ll just give my bank account info so they can send me the money, etc.  This is the first one I’ve heard of by direct bulk mail.  If this pays off, based on response rate and average sucker contribution, I’ll be amazed.  I do like that they didn’t even bother to customize the letter with my contact info anywhere, it’s just “dear sir.”  Apparently they’re clever enough to participate in international identity theft & bank fraud, but not clever enough to use the mail merge function in MS Word.

For the full text of the letter, click on the picture.

BTW, if there are any exceptionally gullible readers of the jonsonblog, I’ve left the scammer’s contact info in place.  While you don’t actually have the same last name as me, I’m pretty sure if you email the letter’s author, he’d be more than happy to find ANOTHER dead wealthy person with no heirs who happens to share whatever last name YOU have.

Horsemeat Dumplings are Suprisingly Affordable

I went to lunch today at a place in Gardena called the Sea Empress, which has a regular menu that you can order off of, but also has a unique business model that nearly killed me & my co-workers.  When you walk in & take a seat, they have roving gangs of waitresses who don’t speak English all that well, all pushing carts laden with various plates of dim sum, really good stuff, too.  So, here’s the weird part (in addition to the food already being made, piping hot and waiting for you tableside before you get there): the waitresses apparently work on commission, and however much they can get you to order impacts their profit. 

When we first sat down, a woman rolled up her cart and mumbled something, which ended up being “char-siu bao?”  If you don’t know, char-siu bao is like a donut that has been steamed instead of fried.  And the inside of the donut doesn’t have raspberry jelly, but barbecued pork.  We didn’t really understand her, and so we politely nodded yes, because it was clear that she wanted a “yes” out of us.  So, that’s how we ended up with the delicious pork donuts, which were actually really good.  But then she kept saying things, and we kept saying yes, and each time she would grab a tray full of delicious little dumplings or rolls or wontons or whatever, and set them on our table.  Eventually, the table ran out of space, at which time she took out her own custom stamp (with her insignia on it) and stamped our bill once for each item we purchased from her.

Then, as we ate, waitress after waitress came over and repeated the custom, each with their own type of tray. Steamed dumpling tray vs fried dumpling tray vs meats dim sum tray, etc.  Each time they had their own unique rubber stamp to indicate which waitress had duped us into buying more food. 

The three of us ate enough food for approximately 17 people, and finally, when dessert came around, the dessert waitress was angry at the other waitresses for cutting into her profits.  Frankly, “dessert waitress” has to be the crappiest job at this place, commission-wise.  She was desperate to get us to buy something, and even went into the back to bring out a taro-root & coconut flavored Jell-O cube that was, well, let’s just say it was no pork donut.  She happily served it to all 3 of us, gave us spoons, really did way more than the other waitresses had done, and then grabbed our bill & stamped it with her unique insignia.

The best part was that the bill that the three of us got for our 17 person dinner plus a couple Tsing-Tao beers was less than $60, approximately $18 each.  I know that based on tips, a waiter makes more if he upsells you into a higher bill, since you pay percentage, but this was a crazy approach, and didn’t really make sense upon reflection.  We missed out on things we might have enjoyed because we were too stuffed, we had too much of things we didn’t like because we didn’t really know what we agreeing to at first, etc.  Still, at these prices, it’s good to know that I can still eat my share of dumplings if I ever become homeless.  Although it does make me worry about the quality of meat being used in the dumplings.

links for 2007-06-23

• 99 Essential Restaurants
  Pulitzer winning food critic Jonathan Gold’s list of the 99 best restaurants in L.A., with an accompanying Google Map
  (tags: food reviews critics LosAngeles restaurants)

I’m not normally aroused by corpses

So, in the past I used to write about wacky news stories like the septugenarian hitwomen, or the bear that was tree’d by a New Jersey housecat, etc, but I’ve been trying not to do that anymore, since there are just so many of them that it’s kind of a waste of time, and what can you really say about these kinds of things that isn’t readily apparent in the story?  But I admit, I’m fascinated by this story of the couple found naked & dead at the foot of an office building, with their clothing up on the roof top several stories above.  Currently police are operating under the theory that the couple, in their early 20s, were having outdoor sex on the roof and rolled off to their doom - no foul play is suspected.  But really, if I wanted to kill a guy in his early 20s, isn’t this just about the best possible way to do it?

After all, who among us didn’t risk their life for sex when they were in their twenties, either in the big picture via an unprotected poking, or more immediately, via sex while driving or sex on a conveyor belt that was feeding a giant shredder or sex at the end of the gun shooting range?  That’s right, none of us.  Which is why this is THE PERFECT CRIME. 

The weirder thing is, though, that when you look past the crushed remains of bones & sinew at the foot of the building, there’s something weirdly sexy about the whole scene.  I mean, we’ve all gotta die, right? But these two died about three seconds after the wildest funnest times they’d had recently.  True, those last three seconds really sucked, but it beats dying after nine months on a ventilator when you’re 87 years old and everyone you know has passed on.  I’m just glad I wasn’t the coroner, frankly, because the unsexy part of the story, the whole mashed bloodied corpses part?  I bet coroners get totally used to that.  So if I was the coroner, I wouldn’t even be grossed out by the human remains, and I would be unable to avoid focusing 100% of my attention on the “sex” part of the story.  So when the crime scene investigators got there and saw me masturbating, I’d probably have a lot of explaining to do.

links for 2007-06-20

• SHOCKING CATS!!!
  DUN DUN DUN!!!!
  (tags: ytmnd cats shocking music)

links for 2007-06-15

• Jolly Roger Hotel, Marina Del Ray

  A co-worker of mine, by all other accounts a completely normal guy, moved out of his expensive apartment four months ago & into this strip-mall travelodge-esque hotel. He has been living there ever since.

  (tags: hotels lodging rent)

EDIT: The missus has indicated that it appears as though I’m mocking a co-worker’s misfortune, as financial hard times have forced him to move into a hotel.  While it would absolutely be in character for me to mock the poor, this is not the case.  In fact, the luxurious Jolly Roger is MORE expensive than the expensive apartment my co-worker left.  So I’m not mocking his financial hardship.  I’m mocking his questionable decision making.

…Of Mice & Men

50 Years ago this Friday, the city of Tulsa Oklahoma buried a time capsule of life in the middle of the great American century, including a glorious Plymouth Belvedere, tail fins & all.  The purpose was to give people in the future a glimpse at what life in the 50s was all about. 

The vault was built sturdy enough to survive a nuclear attack (which should give you an idea of what life in the late 50s was all about right there), but unfortunately it was not built water tight.  Over two feet of standing water had seeped in during the intervening decades, and the Plymouth and the Time Capsule materials were sitting in the middle of it, potentially rusting away (although city officials claim the car may still be salvageable due to a protective wrapping, possibly they used the ClearCote(tm) sealant from Fargo).

Regardless, the whole fiasco made me wonder what of my life I would collect today to give the people of the future a snapshot of what turn of the century life was all about.  I narrowed it down to the following five things:

1) A photo of the sexiest naked people I can find.  Here’s my thinking - with the rise of the internet, and pornography & niche fetishes & all sorts of desensitization, super hot naked people will be as sexy to the citizens of 2057 as photos of Betty Grable in a one piece bathing suit are to people today.  We’ll vaguely recognize that the images have an intended purpose, some sort of arousal, but no one will really actually be turned on by looking at just plain old naked people any more.  Based on my research, at least one of the participants in all future erotica will have to be dressed as a bear, or a clown, or some sort of bear-clown hybrid.

2) An ipod shuffle, one of the new super tiny ones that are smaller than a money clip & hold 100 songs.  In the future, music, and really all digital data will not be stored on a physical medium, but rather wiped directly on to your skin with a series of wet-knaps, like the kind you get at KFC when you are done with your chicken.  In fact, KFC will likely be the world’s largest data distribution company.  People will be hard pressed to remember a time when KFC sold chicken. This situation is already becoming commonplace.

3) A Hydrogen Bomb, the most powerful one I can get my hands on.  This is not to illustrate our war-mongering ways, or to show the people of the future what barbarians we were.  Rather, this will be a live bomb, with a countdown initiated by the first rays of sunlight hitting the weapon.  The bomb will have a large note taped to it reading “Press this button to stop your annihilation.”  If the people of the future can’t read English, fuck ‘em, is what I’m going for here.

4) The dead body of Ann Coulter, or possibly Sean Hannity.  Or both.  I’m not particular.  No identifcation need accompany the remains, nor should any steps be taken to preserve the corpses.

5) A box of things confiscated by the TSA, collected randomly at the end of one travel day from a major metropolitan airport.  The people of the future will be completely fucking stumped as to why we left them half bottles of shampoo & tubes of toothpaste & mouthwash.  If only they knew that this box contained what passed for a legitimate threat in 2007, they would have a good laugh before they went back to defending themselves from the never-ending ferocious onslaught of zombies.

links for 2007-06-14

• Disneyland Park | Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage
  Always loved the submarine rides @ disneyland when I was a kid - this 12 month time lapse video of the redesigned & newly opened rides is very cool
  (tags: Disneyland submarines timelapse)
• Judd “Knocked Up” Apatow’s hilarious email fight with Mark “that 70’s show” Brazil
  (tags: TV writing hollywood grudges)

Academy Awards for EVERYONE

So, I’m torturing myself by reading the user reviews of the corpse-rapingly awful movie Shooter over @ the IMDB; there are over 140, the vast majority quite positive, and my favorite so far is this one:

Mark Wahlberg Academy Award nomination coming and Love that Kate Mara

We start all of our reviews with the following information. My wife and I have seen nearly 100 movies per year for the past 15 years. Recently, we were honored by receiving lifetime movie passes to any movie any time at no cost! So we can see whatever we want whenever we want. The point of this is that CRITICS count for ZERO. Your local critics or the national critics like Ebert are really no different than you or me. The only difference is that they get to write about the movie and are forced to see hundreds of movies whether they want to or not.Therefore, it is our belief that if you get your monies worth for two hours of enjoyment that is good enough for us! We NEVER EVER listen or read the critics. We only care about our friends and those who we know like the same things as us. Well enough about that.

Wow. Mark Wahlberg is spectacular and the movie is outstanding. From start to finish we get a glimse into the real world of politics in Washington DC. Never know who is telling the truth. It is shades of the Bush Administraton with a couple of very good digs at them. Kate Mara is gorgeous and a rising star. Don’t miss it. Action packed from the minute it starts to the very end.

So… this dude is insane, yeah?  I mean, not just because he thinks that badgering his local film chain into giving him a lifetime free pass is an honor, or that he loves a movie that could have been made by 7 monkeys and a steadicam, but because he thinks Mark Wahlberg will win the Best Actor Oscar for his role as the tortured loner Bob Lee Swagger.  So, I clicked on the writer’s profile to read his other reviews, and it’s pretty awesome, actually.

First of all, he’s written 135 so far, which is no small feat.  And true to his word, he does indeed preface each one with his screed about how many movies per year he sees and how critics are no better at determining the worth of a movie than he is and how he can see ANY movie at ANY time he pleases for FREE.  But slowly, a pattern emerged as I perused his reviews…

A LOT of unlikely candidates are going to win the Academy Award for Best Actor this year, if his review headlines are any indication:

Did you ever think that Adam Sandler could win the Academy Award? (reign over me)

Robin Williams spectacular Academy Award material (the night listener)

DAKOTA FANNING destined for more Academy Awards than any other actress (Dreamer)

But far funnier than his casual handing out of Oscars is his absolute pathological hatred of critics, usually evidenced by his championing of terribly reviewed movies, all the more so when they are succesful @ the Box Office:

Critics are they better than you and me? $100,000,000+ and counting (da vinci code)

It Did $48 million 1st weekend and the Critics say it is a failure./They are crazy (mission impossible 3)

Why u should not listen to critics. they are not any better than real people (basic instinct 2)

But the absolute highlight of any internet review is the combination of just an out-right terrible movie with crazy hyperbolic praise, and in that, he does not disappoint:

Where did this terrific movie come from? (Layover, with David Hasselhoff - straight to video release)

Raiders of the Lost Ark is back in the form of Sahara! (sahara)

A whole new franchise..Steve Martin fantastic! (steve martin remake of the pink panther)

So, I guess this makes me seem super-elitist, with my critic-loving, only seeing a few movies a year, big city ways… and maybe this guy has a point, maybe there are no arbitrary standards for what is “good” or “retarded” when it comes to movie making.  Perhaps David Hasselhoff is a diamond in the rough in the tragically overlooked Layover. 

But then again, isn’t this really the fallacy of the internet, and of empowering everyone to speak up?  The only people who will are either fanatics, who are blinded by their love of the thing they’re reviewing, or haters who absolutely must let the world know how terrible the thing they’re reviewing is.  It’s like when we do statistical analysis at work and we normalize for outliers, those few anomalous data that can throw off a curve.  On the internet, it’s nothing BUT outliers.