Movie Madness

So yesterday, Saturday the 23rd, Ross, Meader, and I embarked on a journey to Portland to view a cinematic adventure all of us had been waiting to see for months. We decided to make a day of it and instead of just seeing "Be Kind Rewind" we would go to 2 other movies and then dinner at Longhorn Steakhouse. So they pick me up from work a 12pm and we head on the road to our destination at Cinemagic at 2:40; as the trip went along the car ride became increasingly louder. Meader's car has always had a gruff rumble noise to it because the pipe that leads to the exhaust had a hole in it and apparently that became larger as we went along. Among the rounds of "the movie game" (you have to say an actor/movie to extend the game such as Jim Carrey-The mask then I would say the mask-Cameron Diaz or a different Jim Carrey movie) and we are making good time and the car is getting louder and louder. There is some concern on Meader's part and jokes being made by all about how frigging loud the car was. So that is put aside for a while as we get to the theater, we all approach the line and are confident in our ticket buying abilities well aside from the Liberace self-playing piano they have, they also have selected seating where you get an electronic screen and pick out your seats. It blew my mind and somewhat confused me. So we put our brain power together and coordinated our seating. So we go past the beret wearing stuff, I stifling snickers at that fact, and head to the movie. We get to our seats and to my surprise God himself or a self preserving and -serving lazy person designed the seating. They were leather reclining chairs pretty much and very comfortable, which was exciting considering we had another 6 hours to go movie wise once this one started. First up, "Be Kind Rewind", which was hilarious and I loved it. The "Ghostbusters" remake was the best aside from the line "what's happening to our hood?" I would highly recommend this movie to those traveling to the Portland area or if this movie ever comes our way. So an hour and 40ish minutes later we exit and have 20 minutes until the next movie "Vantage Point", we all decide to get some treats and a drink and are all impressed that this place offers personal pizzas and hamburgers. After the salivations ended I ended up with Raisinettes and a soda. So we head into the next theater with the delicious lazy God seats and have the added bonus of digital film. Now digital film is amazing, it is so clear on the big screen. So the movie starts and I am ok with it and then 15 minutes the movie starts over, but from a slightly different perspective. This happens throughout the whole movie, but very noticeable and annoying for the first 40 minutes. the movie turned out decent for the second half and became more like a regular action flick which I enjoyed. I didn't care for the first half though and overall felt like a bad remake of a 24 episode elongated. The movie ends earlier than we all expected which turned out to be a good thing because we had a hard time finding the next theater in Portland which was the Nickelodeon.

At first we had no idea of really where we should go because we listened to yahoo maps which turned out to be wrong. So eventually we find it and park in the garage right next to/on top of it and head in with 10 minutes to spare. We head in buy the tickets to "In Bruges", which is a movie I had never heard of before though Ross swears he told me about it. Before the movie I need to hit up the bathroom and find it upstairs and down a narrow dimly lit and turny hallway. It is really quiet and creepy up there so much that when I opened the door to leave someone who was heaidn in at the same time scare the shit out of me. I jumped like a 6 year old girl at the thought of the boogie man and as everyone does I played it cool and left feeling pretty sure the guy didn't notice me get freaked out. I get to the theater and sit down to notice that the theater is filling quickly quite to my surprise. I had never heard of it so apparently I figured noone else had since I am obviously on the pulse of hollywood. The movie was absolutely hilarious and Colin Farrell was excellent, the movie was about two hit men that had to lay low in Bruges, Belgium and boredom and sight-seeing occur. The movie is unexpectedly hilarious until the end when it is graphically violent and kind of tarnished the whole movie. I still thoroughly enjoyed and like this movie and would reccomend it.
Alright, so our movie lust has been quenched and we head off to get some dinner. It is around 9 pm and we come to the conclusion that we have made an excellently executed plan. So anyway we head to Longhorn steakhouse and get a table instantly. The waitress comes over and asks for our drinks so I decide to go first. As I order my much loved and much made fun of by everyone else beverage of mango iced tea the waitress starts to grin and semi snickers and says ok at the same time, so I am slightly offended and possibly think that maybe I am interpreting the situation wrong until Meader started to smile and look at me as if to corraborate my initial feelings of she just called me a homo without saying it. So we all have a decent laugh over it and there are gay jokes thrown at me, but I enjoyed my god-damned mango iced tea it is so good. So I eventually order a steak partially because I want one and partially to prove my manhood to her. I threatened to order a 76 oz. steak to Meader to compensate for the gay iced tea incident, but instead went with a 12 oz sirloin which was delicious. I finish off the steak and we pay our bills, on a sidenote I tipped the waitress 50 cents less than I was going to because as I stated "she called me a fag with her eyes", and we headed out to go home.
Alright, I brought up the loud car for reason those few paragraphs ago because it was ten times worse on the ride home then down. We are all very tired and have the fucking space shuttle going off inside the car, the sound shook the change in the car and as Meader put it "goes straight to the center of your brain" which it did. Everytime he would accelerate the car would blast off into loudness. We could barely hear each other at times and the radio was a savior when turned up enough. We got home at around 1ish and I instantly crashed into deep sleep and woke up at 11 am this morning. Overall, it was a very enjoyable and fun trip filled with good movies, good times, good friends and one fucking ridiculously loud car.

Super Tuesday

So after watching the results of all of the caucuses, primaries, and town meetings I came to a conclusion....I don't like any of the candidates. Even worse there are no other options, the ones hanging on the fray belong there because they are crazy. I looked at each candidate and was not impressed or did not feel any swell of confidence in any candidate. Now most people ask me in the house what I think or what certain things mean in the political world, naturally because I did graduate with a political science degree. I don't mind answering questions or spewing my opinions, but the thing is I don't care about politics in the sense of campaigns and elections which is what people think of when you say my major. U.S. micro-managing politics and campaigns are boring to me, I don't care what it takes to be a politician, I am interested in what it takes to make a government run or why certain countries have the regimes they do. I am more interested in the philosophy of politcs and nation-state. I will talk more on this later. Back to the current election cycle's campaigning. As I was saying none of the candidates really interest me at this point, even though to be honest Obama is looking better and better. I cannot stand Hillary, not because she IS a woman, but because that is what she is running on. Her platform consists of I am a woman and I am not Bush, congrats I can't wait to vote for you. The Democrats are full of empty promises, which is funny to say because so are the Republicans, but the Dems always promise change and that they will stand up for the little people. Riiigghht, "we'll stop Bush cold in his tracks now that we control the house and senate and the purse strings." Really? I didn't realize rollign over and doing everything Bush wants was resistance (maybe the path of least resistance), but it does dick for any kind of promise or cause they hailed and ran their train of change on. Th Democrats don't know what they stand for, so how could they fight for it other than being anti-republican. Now I am not championing the Republicans either cause they suck too, but they have a straight forward stance on most things. So you know what you are getting when you talk about a Republican platform. You may know what you are getting with the Republicans and I agree with certain ideologies they have, but none of their candidates look good to me. There is Romney who is too much of a polished politician for me to even have a chance, forget about his religion. Ron Paul just looks crazy and his ads have revolution with evol backwards to spell love, give me a break. McCain, eh, I am so-so on him; I don't know really where he stands. Mike Huckabee is really doofy looking and is more known for his eccentricness rather than his actual stance on issues. So right now the Republicans are out, so on to the Democrats. There is Mike Gravel, who is old and has seemingly come out of nowhere. I can't say much on him because I have no idea who he is. I don't enjoy Hillary because she is running on her husband's success, that she is a woman, and she is not Bush. Now the last one may be enough for most of the nation to vote for her, but I will not. She is a very intelligent and motivated woman, but she panders more than I have seen anybody pander before. She changes accents and interests depending on her audience. Now some would say that is effective public speaking and what politicians do, but I can't stand her she is too fake for my taste. Obama is a new guy on trhe block who seems capable of doing the job and not too too fake. So he is looking like the front runner to me personally at the moment (John Edwards will most likely be his running mate). So there really isn't a great choice to me for president this upcoming cycle.

Now onto a different topic, yet related. My issue with my generation of voters. They are completely useless, if P Diddy isn't selling them a t-shirt in order to vote then it won't happen, even then it is a gamble. My generation of voters are given too much credit for being the crusaders of change, unless they start attaching a vote for pres. facebook app. or add it to xbox live, this generation will not vote in the quantities Mtv loves to say we do. 2004 election- this generation was supposed to change the course of history and come out in droves to elect Kerry and kick Bush out of office...hmmm..good job guys (I voted for Bush) stop bitching about how Bush is still in office, maybe if you had voted things would be somewhat different. On a sidenote, one of the guys in the house said he wanted to vote for Huckabee because on New Years instead of going to some political event he went hunting and that meant he was an everyman or a credible candidate. I told him straight to his face that he is someone I don't want with voting power. That is such a hill-billy reason to vote, I bet if Huckabee had a car named the General Lee it would have sweetened the deal for him. It really bothers me, voting isn't hard to do at all. You register there and check off names or flick switches, holy shit that is way too complicated for many it seems. I understand those who can't make it because of work or what have you that would void a person from voting, but the U.S. has one of the lowest voter turnouts out of all industrial democratic countries. A lot of it is laziness. Some blame that stat on the fact that we have the electoral college and a FPP system or first past the post= winner take all; whereas most other countries have proportional systems or mixed party systems. This seems to create a sense of efficacy among voters, they feel that their vote matters because in the prop. system if the candidate beats a certain threshold, most countries are at like 3-5% of the votes, psuedo-democratic countries have higher thresholds in order to monopolize the government and make it harder for the opposition to gain a foothold, they are allowed in the government where our system if 100 votes to 99 votes, those other 99 do not count for anything. So it is a somewhat convincing argument for the different types of systems, but I don't think the other systems would work in this country very well. And the reasons why it wouldn't work in this country is what interests me.
I find what makes up a country, a regime, and it's citizens are what interests me. I love the philosophy behind a nation, not so much the day to day managing of one. Factors such as resource, location, and religion are major determining factors. Such as religion in the Middle East or resource in the Middle East. Both of those factors are huge in why they are autocratic countries. Books such as Plato's The Republic and Symposium are great reads, very tough to get through but very interesting. So I could go on and on, but I think I have tpyed enough for today. Soon enough I will go further into the philosophy of politics and regimes.