Everybody should take a minute to watch this, the greatest fight scene in movie history.

I haven’t seen the movie it’s from (and thank goodness the IMDB is there to provide the all-important Chinese title for this action classic), but I’m hoping it answers the questions this clip raises:

• How come it sounds like our hero and villain are made out of bookcases?
• Why is Stingray dressed like a pharmacist? And how did he get out of a lab coat, shirt, and tie so quickly? And get all greased up?
• What did Stingray do that was all that bad? Other than grimacing and licking knives? Was it bad enough to warrant such serious eye trauma?
• How come our hero is such a wuss that he’s fighting a guy who only has one hand free and he still needs to get rescued by one-armed Felicity Huffman from Transamerica and a towel?
• Couldn’t they have taken a few more minutes to come up with some better quips? Like, “Here’s looking at you, Stingray!” or “Enjoy the ride, Stingray, but be careful you don’t get hooked!” or “At least now you won’t have to look at your own god-awful poodle mullet every morning, Stingray!”

And to answer the guy who posted it on YouTube in the first place: yes. Yes, it is.

Update: Okay, I guess I didn’t read the IMDB entry closely enough. Apparently it is a Hong Kong movie, so the Chinese title is given first for a reason. And dopey guy isn’t the hero; Cynthia Rothrock is, which is why she has to come in and save the day. I imagine his drooling problem also has something to do with it.

I still say that this scene would’ve been a brilliant finale for Transamerica.

I’m sure there are worse things than being alone in a nice hotel in the LA suburbs and getting a severe case of gastroenteritis. I think I still deserve some sympathy, though.

It started Thursday night, while my imagination was still filled with the promise of new dual-booting Apple computers. I’d thought it was food poisoning at first, but as we’ll discover later it was too severe and lasted too long for that. Incidentally, you know how basketball teams retire jerseys by raising them to the rafters? I’m building something similar with foods I can no longer eat because they’re the last thing I remember having before getting violently ill. Now, to the list of tequila (college stupidity), limes (same incident), avocados (stomach flu not long after moving to CA), and Northgate mall tofu curry (threw up on Barry Levinson), I can add hummus.

So I was violently ill in the hotel bathroom all Thursday night and much of Friday, stuff coming out of both ends of me in colors Pantone hasn’t even assigned numbers yet. I kept trying to get sleep in the meantime, and the beds in the hotel were really, really nice, so that’s at least one point in favor of being sick away from home. But I kept having these weird fever dreams and thinking I was in the bathroom when I was still in bed, and vice versa. The outcome of each is too gruesome to describe here. I think falling asleep on the bathroom floor believing I’d made it back to bed was a little bit better, because I could pretend I was Jimi Hendrix.

I left a $20 tip to the hotel cleaning staff. I don’t think it was enough.

I ended up missing hotel check-out time and then just sleeping through my flight time; I only woke up to either do something unspeakable in the bathroom, ask the housekeepers to go away, or answer the front desk’s phone call and confirm that I would be staying another night. Disney was able to reschedule my flight to Saturday afternoon, and I’d thought that 48 hours would’ve been enough time to get it out of my system and make it home safely.

Somehow I managed to return the car and take the plane and drive myself back home safely — still miserable, but at least the vomiting had stopped. Saturday night I finally had a bowl of soup, the first thing I’d eaten since Thursday, so I’d thought I was on the road to recovery.

No luck there. Even though I didn’t have to throw up any more, I sure did feel like it, and I kept having to go to the bathroom. And the stomach cramps had started — really sharp pains that had me convinced something had burst. I still had my old prescription of hydrocodone (Vicodin) from my last stomach-related incident — children reading this blog should be aware that I don’t condone taking unprescribed medicine that’s 1 year past its expiration date without seeing a physician — and while it definitely helped me sleep, it wasn’t quite enough to stop the cramping.

My parents were in a panic, and my mom had Safeway deliver a ton of groceries here. Finally on Monday afternoon, after falling asleep/passing out on the couch for three hours, I called Mac and asked him to give me a ride to the hospital. He gets 10000 karma points for taking early of work and driving me down there and sticking with me the whole time. They gave me an IV, which was kind of cool as I’d never had one before, some antibiotics and something to stop the stomach cramps, and even better, basically gave me permission to keep using the pain pills (even though they didn’t prescribe more, dammit).

So I had one last precious dose of that last night — they’re habit-forming, and although they’re awesome and I’m a huge fan of narcotics in principle, they didn’t really help with the stomach cramps, since those woke me up again at 6 this morning. And for the first time in a few days, I had real dreams instead of those weird fever dreams — in one I was on the Battlestar Galactica and had to fly a Viper back to San Francisco to catch the Olympics. That was cool.

Today’s been the first day of recovery. I’ve had an on-again off-again headache which I’m assuming is caused by the lack of caffeine, but that’s something I had planned to cut out anyway. I’m actually craving food again, although I can’t eat much other than bread and soup. I’m reluctant to say that the stomach pains have stopped, since every time I say that they come back, but it has been over 12 hours since the last one. I can actually see myself getting a good night’s sleep tonight.

I was thinking I was showing considerable self-control. Apple’s been releasing all kinds of new iPods and new, slightly different alternate-universe Macs that were just like the ones I have but slightly better and shinier. Still, no desire to buy one. “I’ll wait until they come up with something that’s significantly better,” I thought. “No sense wasting too much money on minor upgrades.”

But now they’ve got this Boot Camp crap going on. I’ve been wanting a faster Mac, and a laptop that runs Windows. Just this week, in fact, I’ve needed to run Windows-only stuff several times. And when I got back to the hotel, I’ve wanted to run World of Warcraft at an acceptable speed. And then Apple goes and announces official support for dual booting.

It’s like they want my money or something.

Now I’ve just got to get rid of this 1.25 GHz albatross. And by “albatross” I mean the best laptop I’ve ever owned that’s still in great shape and is available for a steal.

When you’re a procrastinator, like I am, and you work from home on a computer, like I do, you end up seeing a lot of stupid on the internets. Stupidity on such a level that it’s not enough to just sit back and say, “man, is that stupid;” you’ve got to go evangelical and spread the word.

When you’re as lazy and attention-deprived as I am, that sense of indignation fades quickly, and you move on. I always assumed that I’d be bitching about digg.com (slashdot for sub-literates) or Television Without Pity (a TV website that’s populated entirely by the abrasive, plain girls everybody avoided in high school, and still somehow manages to be even gayer than gay.com). But it’s hard to work up enough enthusiasm to rag on them.

For some reason this post on Valleywag pushed me over the edge. I’m a fan of Sjöberg’s, but not enough to jump to defend him or anything — for all I know, the guy’s a dick in real life. Still, he’s funny, he’s occasionally insightful, and he puts genuine content out there on the internets for free. Valleywag can only claim three one out of those four.

The pointlessness of it is what bugs me. What’s the point of ragging on a column and its author for not being tech-oriented when the author’s said he’s approaching it not as a tech column? “Can’t be bothered to do his job?” Where did that come from?

Now, I get the impression that because I write a post for SFist every once in a while (when I’m not out of town), I’m supposed to have some kind of weird relationship with the Valleywag. I haven’t quite figured it out — based on the comments I’ve read, either I’m supposed to lay off them as an unprofessional courtesy, or I’m supposed to have some kind of friendly rivalry going on. I don’t get that, because I don’t see what there is in common:

• I don’t have any illusions about being a tech journalist or insider. I look at what real insiders and journalists write, repeat it, and then add my half-baked opinions and references to movies and TV shows. I guess you could say that I do for real tech news what “The Family Guy” and “Robot Chicken” do for real comedy.
• I’m not a moron.

I used to assume that even though I think a gossip site about silicon valley was a completely stupid concept, that there are people out there who are into that kind of thing. Now I think that even if there are people into that kind of thing, they are also stupid.

Apple’s known for the yabbos who are obsessed with Steve Jobs. They deserve to get made fun of, but Valleywag’s missing the point. They don’t deserve to be ragged on because they’re obsequious, they deserve to be ragged on because they’re obsessed with Steve Jobs. Pointing out completely irrelevant gossip about Steve Jobs isn’t any “cooler.” And at least he’s someone notable — who the hell cares to see candid photos of the Google founders wearing a dress? Or read some moron bitterly ragging on something as stupid as an internet website?

I’m staying here alone in a hotel on a business trip, and I’ve finally had one more of those life experiences that I’d never tried before.

Don’t worry, it’s nothing gross or anything; I just ordered room service. Holy crap, that shit’s expensive! It’s one thing when you’re stuck in Glendale and facing the prospect of driving through the already-ridiculous LA traffic made worse by a torrential downpour, just for the sake of eating somewhere in Glendale. But that’s just my excuse for this once.

I can’t imagine living like that all the time — are there really people who do that? And worse, aspire to living like that? I’ll still waste money on goofy hobbies like videogames and comic books and such, but I can at least rationalize that away to saying it’s relatively rare. And it’s not the case where I’m freaked out about it because I have to pay for it; I don’t, but it still just feels wrong blowing that much money on something as stupid as food. (That wasn’t awful, but wasn’t particularly good, either).

Still, I’m in LA and I know that I’m surrounded by people whose goal is to get where they can afford to spend that much on food all the time. It just seems gross. Maybe I’m just not about the bling.

And that should give y’all a sign how interesting this trip has been; I’m sitting alone in a hotel room writing a rambling internet blog post about the distribution of wealth.

Disney magic has transformed a week-long business trip into a two-week-long business trip, since I’ve got to leave Monday morning for a week down in LA. On the plus side, I’m… well, saving on groceries, I guess.

Of course, it’s hard to feel too sorry for myself when last week ended up being as nice a “business trip” as you can get while still calling it that. That was the kind of thing I was imagining when I was thinking of some day working for Disney — getting stuff done, seeing enough of the behind-the-scenes stuff to be cool but not so much as to ruin it. And getting time to just goof off and enjoy it, to be reminded of the point of working for Imagineering in the first place (it’s not to make tons of money and climb up the management hierarchy, contrary to what the LA mentality may suggest).

This was my first real trip to Disney World as an adult. Going with the family doesn’t really count, since I’m stuck in perpetual 16-years-old-ness whenever I’m around my family, and also we end up just going around doing the same stuff we always do for nostalgia value more than anything else. And the last trip for work didn’t count, since I only had a couple hours here and there to rush into a park on my own and try (unsuccessfully) to treat it like a working vacation.

This time I got to see it as an adult would see it, and it’s pretty damn impressive. Disneyland is still more fun in a lot of ways, and there are a lot of things it gets right that Disney World just doesn’t master (Pirates of the Caribbean, for instance, and the Magic Kingdom at WDW just feels a lot more cold and empty and imposing, somehow). I guess the corny comparison would be that Disneyland is a single theme park done perfectly, while Disney World is an entire city built around the concept.

I’m sure that if I’d been spending the whole time worrying about how much everything cost, or how I was going to keep the kids well-rested and entertained, or any of the other genuine adult concerns that people have that make them critical of Disney, it would’ve been different. But as it was, I was free to just go around and be impressed.

Burbank is going to seem a lot more mundane, I’m sure. Tonight is a comedy show with Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman, and others, which I’m expecting to be anti-Disney. After that I’m going to do as much sleeping in my own bed and playing with my own videogames as I can until I have to get on another plane.