Photo for Monday, July 20, 2009

Posted: 7:50 am, Monday, July 20th

The Brew n' View is actually not much of a thing in New York, but I've totally done this with, say, a baseball game.

My mother was in town this weekend, and, God, did we walk all over the place. One thing I'm holding back on mentioning for a strip (when we get back from Portland, and, yes, Portland, Oregon, although I've been to Portland, Maine), but yesterday, we spent three hours milling around Green-wood Cemetery, getting lost a few times and seeing all sorts of great stuff. It's fairly morbid, I guess, for people who just two weeks prior lost their father and husband to spend the entire afternoon in a cemetery and then retire to the apartment for a gin and tonic, but it was a lovely way to spend the day. Picked up a bit of sunburn and some sore feet, but we saw the graves of Boss Tweed, Charlie Ebbets, Leonard Bernstein, Henry Chadwick, Samuel Morse, and Samuel Reid, among many other of the 600,000 in there. There's a current display of Civil War Veterans at the cemetery (in addition to the overall monument), with all the new gravestone laid out by the entrance before being relocated to where the dead actually rest, and a Tranquility Garden. Highly recommended, in case anyone needs anything to do one day in the 718.

Rough weekend for old, wise guys.

2.0 and I saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on Friday night, in IMAX, at Lincoln Square. What a miserable viewing experience that was. We got there 40 minutes early and still had to sit in the front row. And what's with this 3D shit movies are foisting on us? Guh. The movie itself was good - I'm not sure if I liked it as much as the much tighter Order of the Phoenix (I have to say that Harry's copy of the Prophet was discouragingly static in the opening scene, despite the waitress commenting that she saw the pictures move), but it was surely the funniest of the movies so far. And in perhaps a cinematic first, a battle sequence present in the book was *removed* for the film. How strange. Still, very good, and we had a weird little promo for the Cartoon Network with an Andrew W.K. song ahead of it was the kind of dumb but still blisteringly awesome because it was Andrew W.K. I'm trying, and failing, to find an mp3 of it.

My favorite bit from his Twitter feed: "I'm working on the book! THANK YOU, GLEN! PARTY FOR THE NEXT TEN MINUTES! And then party for an additional amount of time." Sound advice.

The hell are "Late Night Tacos at Midnight" Doritos supposed to tast - well, OK, I know what they're supposed to taste like. *How* are they supposed to taste like that? What do tacos at midnight taste like? Drunk?

bullfrog

MNP -- Monday, July 20 2009, 09:10 am

question - can you watch 3d Movies without the glasses? or do they look weird? the glasses make me dizzy...

Love Green-Wood.

Also love the face Andrew W.K. is making in that still on the YouTube video.

Joe B., how was the tunnel tour?

The first 20 minutes of Harry Potter did not allow for non-3D viewing. Without the glasses it was blurry and had multiples of whatever was on screen. Thankfully they spared us from watching the whole movie that way. Otherwise I think I would have lost my lunch.

I'm not sure if the non-IMAX movies had 3D though...anyone?

There's a regular Brew 'n View right near my house, at the Vic Theater. Def. worth checking out for a night in Chicago, and yeah, more social than sitting at home.

Re the Apple support thing, I've restored factory settings about three times, including from disk mode, but still get the same freeze-up when transferring songs from my PC. This = not good.

Also, grooveshark.com. Liking it more than Pandora.

Someday Ron and Pete will buy new shirts. Ron's is from 2005, at least in our world http://www.fivebuckstofriday.com/archive/archive041105.html (and it's scary that I found that comic in 1 minute, but Google is my friend). I should not talk. I was wearing an older T shirt just the other day.

The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel tour was excellent. The 11:00 show had 140 people (about 40 more than signed up!) so it took an hour just to get us all down the ladder in the manhole. We didn't get out till 2:00, so I could see that he had a good 100 or more lined up for the next one too. The tunnel itself is just very impressive, and Bob Diamond's narration about its history and how he found it is as entertaining as ever.

I thought about the tunnel tour when I was in the cemetery with my mother yesterday, but the whole reason I never bought a ticket back when you mentioned it was Dad's status. Next time!

Ron will probably never replace the Sleater-Kinney shirt, because I lost mine. It must live on! Yeah, I've been buying fewer t-shirts lately, so the boys haven't been in new duds in a bit. I will tend to this immediately!

One day a long time ago I was wandering around Prospect Park and the streets on the eastern edges of Green-wood Cemetery, and I thought maybe I'd go in and look around, but the guard stopped me and said I would have to walk around it, as if I were just trying to take a short cut. I probably looked a little scruffy that day, I don't know. That was the closest I've come. I should not consider it a permanent ban, and I should try again some day. PS- I take it someone emphasized the correct spelling of Green-wood to you.

CK mentioned it in her blog once, but I think I was already doing it that way, anyway. The map right next to me as I write this also says Green-wood.

They're redoing the massive archway that is the official entrance (5th and 25th), which is a shame, because it's really beautiful. If you're not in easy walking/biking distance, I'd say wait 'til that's done.

3-D is done for two reasons:
1) To keep people from bring hand held cameras, film the movie, and then send onto any one of a number of piracy outlets.
2) To bring people into the movies because without 3-D, they would be more inclined until the movies are out on Netflix.

Note, that so far, it's kept the movie chains viable but not necessarily profitable.

I've said it once before and I'll say it again. A movie about Harry Potter, and him realizing that girls have boobs and all of those hormones implosion, and doesn't include at least an attempt, a discussion, a joke about using the invisible joke to see these girls naked renders the movie a sham. A sham!

I meant invisible cloak. Invisible cloak!

The anti-piracy makes sense, Miyaa, thanks. Aside from being stupidly gimmicky (only the first 20 minutes in 3D? big flashing red glasses on the screen when it's time to take them off?), it forces the director to make weird staging decisions like having shit randomly pass in between the actors and the camera, to emphasize the 3Dness of it all.

This would've been the one for invisibility cloak-in-the-girls'-cloakroom, too. It was teen hormonriffic!

Happy thoughts to MCA, who's fighting off cancer right now. Here's the new Beasties track, also.

http://stereogum.com/archives/new-beastie-boys-feat-nas---too-many-rappers_080221.html

The odious commentors at Stereogum don't like it, and it's not about to get confused with anything off of Paul's Boutique or Ill Communication, but I'd put it above anything off of To the 5 Boroughs.

You should probably not racially profile the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard. I just don't see it ending well for you.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/07/harvard.html

Thanks to you, I have now followed Andrew W.K. on Twitter, because I do need more injunctions to party in my day.

That dude updates constantly. His life is evidently one big Twitter party.

Which is good, because the Times is just full of grim news.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/nyregion/21vacancies.html

This lede from the Times front page sounds like I wrote it:

"NASA has confirmed the discovery, which apparently shows that the planet was hit by something big recently."

This maybe shows that something really big hit it, sometime last week, maybe?

Today's Andrew W.K.ism:

"I just video taped myself making a pancake feast! Pancakes are one of my favorite ways to party. Do you want me to show you?"

Heavens, yes!

Wow, there's a 70-page speech in Atlas Shrugged? I'm glad I never finished reading that.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/daily-buzzkills-ayn-rand-and-charlize-theron-will,30686/