I saw The Day After Tomorrow on Tuesday.

(Okay, if today is Thursday… [insert probably done-to-death “that’s today” joke here])

Great effects. Fun story. The cardboard cut-out characters were cut from a decently thick-enough cardboard that they had me fooled for a while.

NOT ENOUGH DEATH.

Sweet merciful crap. If you’re going to run a wall of water through Manhattan, you need to inflict us with the bloating, floating corpses. Sure, we see a few bodies here and there, but the reality of this disaster movie is that we come out of it thinking “bad weather would be fun.” Sure, a few unnamed characters disappear, and in one or two cases we see someone actually get killed, but for the most part it’s all passionless stuff.

Remember that scene in The Sum of All Fears where we see the fast montage of people at the football game? And then the nuke goes off, and we are forced to IDENTIFY with at least one now-incinerated person in the crowd? PASSION. EMOTION. POWER.

The message in The Day After Tomorrow is “don’t screw up the environment.” It’s heavy-handed, the science goes from decent cutting-edge stuff to the inane contrivances of narrativium and “plot device,” and the power figures are all straw-men. Fine — that’s typical eco-political sensationalism. But they screwed it up, because IT LOOKS COOL AND YOU CAN BELIEVE NOBODY REALLY GOT HURT.

Bleah.

Here’s a comic about it.

Pathetically, I enjoyed the movie.

–Howard “hypocrisy now, procrastination later” Tayler

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/West/06/02/modest.clothing.ap/index.html

(quick-take: modest clothing for teens is on the way back in, and the movement has an 11-year-old champion.)

–Howard

It’s not often that I can talk about day-job stuff here. After all, most of what comprises my day is the sort of strategic thing that would be Bad For Novell to have as common knowledge. Not sex-lies-and-videotape stuff, mind you. I’m talking product plans, competitive advantages, and nasty things I’m preparing to do to my dim-witted and evil competitors.

No, usually the Novell stuff I need to talk about I talk about at Novell. But THIS time I’ve got a gaffe I need to excise publicly.

I said “frangible” when I meant “fungible.”

I said it in a presentation to 50 of the most influential people in the company.

My buddy and self-styled nemesis Ted called me on it, right down to the “you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

“Frangible” means “easily broken.”
“Fungible” means “interchangable.”

Thus, in context, “frangible” is non fungible, and its inappropriate use rendered my entire presentation rather frangible.

How embarrassing.

In other news, just this morning I learned how to pronounce “autochthon” (aw-TOCK-thun) and managed to use it in a casual conversation. Sadly, that experience failed fungibility for redemption from this afternoon’s gaffe.

Had my vocabulary been a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun, I would have put my eye out by now.

–Howard

The box I got at Sam’s Club says these “Boca burgers” are “vegan.” I got’cher vegan right here, pal. They taste GREAT when you fry them up in bacon grease.

Howard’s Low-Carb Boca Burger:

Fry two strips of thick-cut bacon, halved. Fry ’em crisp. Don’t drain the grease.
While the bacon cooks, prep the other ingredients: you’ll need thinly sliced onion discs, a pair of iceberg lettuce shells (the whole leaf, popped straight off a fresh head), a slice of cheddar, a pair of Claussen dill sandwich-sliced pickles, and the usual suspects for condiments (catsup, mayo, mustard, miracle-whip, whatever).

When the bacon is done, fry the boca patty in the bacon grease over medium-low heat for about a minute, covered. Flip it (GENTLY, that grease WILL spatter), top with cheese, and cover again for 90 seconds. lift the lid, arrange the bacon in the cheese, and let it go for another 30 seconds (total of 3 minutes cooking time on the Boca patty.

Now, work fast…

Slap onion discs, pickles, and condiments on the burger, and carefully slide the burger into one of your two lettuce shells. Then wrap the other shell around it. This keeps your hands out of the messy bit, while still allowing you to hold it sandwich-style.

Note: once you’ve got it put together DON’T LET GO. That lettuce knows full well that it’s unnatural for a burger to be wrapped this way, and is eager to extricate itself from the delicious bundle, leaving you with burger-in-hand or burger-in-lap. If you’ve used good, fresh shells, and you hold on tight, you’ll be okay though. You’re smarter than the lettuce.

I just finished one of these. I’ve found the Boca patties cooked in bacon grease have some advantages over hamburger patties.
1) No fast-food-joint burger smell in the house.
2) It’s vegan (or it was before the bacon grease) so it’s probably marginally better for you.
3) They keep in the freezer forever.

The disadvantage… you’re paying 60 cents a patty, and tasty though it may be, it ain’t fresh-ground top sirloin.

So far I’ve dropped four of the pounds I gained last week.

–Howard