Before I give anybody the wrong impression: I still like theme parks. In general. I can see myself going to them, and enjoying them.

But sometimes on a Monday night, you just want to go out for dinner. Without walking through clouds of fog and past giant globes and guys doing the robot to an 80’s funk cover of REM’s “Superman” and giant signs of the Hulk and King Kong to get theme park food. It takes the edge off the magic.

I suspect that too much exposure to theme park environments gives you a warped sense of reality. Even moreso than normal.

Is LA always like this, or do I just have a seriously skewed impression of it on account of the theme restaurants and roller coasters?

On her blog, Rain says that this video audition for Stanley Kubrick is the funniest thing ever, and she may be right.

People in the comments keep going back and forth about whether it’s fake, which is missing the point. Either way, it’s awesome. (My vote goes for “fake,” which somehow makes it even cooler).

The neighbors’ Halloween party last night had an extended jam session on the bongos that lasted from about midnight to 2 or 3 AM. (The time change and my intense desire to go to sleep made it difficult to gauge). Once it was all over and replaced with the sounds of people in their early twenties right outside my window shouting about how drunk they were and how they had to get a cab, I was finally able to get to sleep and have some of the weirdest dreams.

The best part about my dreams is that they’re just weird enough to be marginally entertaining, and so obvious it’s easy to figure out what they’re telling me. Here are two of last night’s:

I have to do a project pitch of some sort for a company in China, but I don’t have any ideas. I realize I’ve been putting it off for too long and it’s time I have to turn in something. I spend a couple of days writing whatever comes to mind, then turn it in. The next day, the Emperor of China calls me into his palace and starts chewing me out. He says my ideas are totally lame and half-assed, and then, “With all your going-on about how great you are, I expected something really spectacular. But this is sub-standard work, mediocre at best.”

I stand there for a minute, thinking it’s not appropriate to argue with the Emperor of China, then finally speak up. I say that I never go on about how great I am, and he isn’t being fair. He says, “whatever,” and sends me away.

Then I’m at a mall, with a friend of mine from high school and another woman who I can’t picture or identify, but I know I have a huge crush on her. I split off from them to go to a Johnny Rockets-style restaurant in the mall, except it’s owned by Frito-Lay and all the dishes are Cheetos-themed. While I’m standing in line at a counter to place my order, I notice they have this weird lighting effect on everyone in line. It affects just your skin — not your hair or clothing — and makes it look like you’re made of Cheetos. I keep passing my hand in and out of the light beam, staring at other customers’ faces, and wondering how they did it.

I turn around and see that my friend and the other woman are standing behind me. My friend is really interested in the effect, but the other woman (who I still can’t see or identify) just mutters that it’s lame. She says she can understand why the Emperor of China thought it was a bad idea.

Incidentally, if you like reading other people’s dreams, the site Slow Wave by artist Jesse Reklaw has comic strips based on reader-submitted dreams.

I realize you’re supposed to finish a book before you write a book report on it, but 1) I’m really enjoying this one, and 2) I’m bored and want to virtual-talk to somebody, and c) who knows, I could die tomorrow, and everyone would be at the wake lamenting, “If only there’d been more time. Now we’ll never get the chance to ask Chuck if he enjoyed In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson.” (In case I drop dead while blogging: the answer is yes, I’m enjoying it a lot).

When I was reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, I said that I was really impressed with Bryson’s writing but was frustrated with how he handled the material. While a historian and magazine columnist writing about science didn’t work well for me, a humorist writing travel memoirs works great.

For starters, it’s about Australia. Who doesn’t love Australia? Satanists, that’s who. And possibly New Zealanders, which is just about the same thing. The impression you get from In a Sunburned Country is that the country has the most bizarre and inhospitable environment on the planet, with the friendliest people in the world trying to counter-balance that.

The book is also funny as hell. I was sold as soon as I read the passage where Bryson describes himself falling asleep in someone’s car:

Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injected with a powerful experimental muscle relaxant. My legs fall open in a grotesque come-hither manner; my knuckles brush the floor. Whatever is inside — tongue, uvula, moist bubbles of intestinal air — decides to leak out. From time to time, like one of those nodding-duck toys, my head tips forward to empty a quart or so of viscous drool onto my lap, then falls back to begin loading again with a noise like a toilet cistern filling.

Reading that was the first time I’ve laughed out loud at a book since I first found Roy Blount Jr.’s stuff. And he’s consistent; the book is filled with genuinely funny passages; even when he goes for the corny or predictable joke, it’s hilarious.

The best surprise of the book for me is that it’s reminded me to drop the preconceived ideas I have about people. Not Australians, in particular — the country as described in the book matches pretty well with how I’ve always imagined it — but people in general. I was pretty dismissive of Bill Bryson’s books, figuring anything that popular can’t possibly be good. I assumed they were light, and easy to read (both of which are true, it turns out), and full of Country Home Companion-style heartwarming, wry humor. I imagined the target audience, like Bryson himself, were suburban mid-westerners in their 50s who had excess income and leisure time they wanted to fill with something mildly adventurous. In short, the CBS crowd.

That was dispelled the first couple of times he said “fuck” and described himself drawing a cartoon about salmon masturbating. It sounds as if all you have to do is cuss and make giggling jokes about sex to keep me entertained, and while that’s true, that’s not my point. In fact, my point is the opposite. We’ve gotten so used to the idea that comedy has to be “edgy” to be funny, that it’s become just as tired a stereotype as the opposite. I suspect that people are a lot less sheltered and tightly-wound than we imagine them to be, and when your whole schtick is built around shocking people, more often than not you’re just being boorish.

The real talent isn’t in taking it upon yourself to shock people out of their complacent Father Knows Best existence, it’s having the subtlety and nuance to recognize exactly when saying “fuck” makes the joke. I’m glad I was wrong to be so dismissive about Bryson; he’s a lot more talented than I’d assumed.

It’s coming up on November again, which means another International Taiko Festival in Berkeley and another post where I tell people they should check it out. The tickets are more than a little pricey, but it’s usually a spectacular show. If anybody out there’s planning to go, let me know so’s I don’t have to sit there by myself.

Until then, I’ve got the first of my home movies from Tokyo up on the interweb. I’d been hoping to see a genuine taiko performance in Japan, but didn’t know where to look. On one of my days off, I was headed through Yoyogi Park on the way to the Meiji Shrine, followed the sound of far-off drumming, and wandered right into the middle of the Tokyo Sri Lanka Festival. There I caught the tail end of a taiko performance on stage. I don’t speak or read Japanese, so I don’t know the name of the group that was performing.

The videos suffer a little from the compression, and the fact that I can’t hold a camera steady on account of my condition, but the basic idea’s there. Here’s their final performance (about 7 minutes):

and its encore (about 2 and a half minutes):

I’m way too old and disinterested to be getting into a “which console rocks hardest” battle, but I still read the videogame blogs and am bemused by the wackiness surrounding the Nintendo Wii.

Specifically, it has the power to turn people into hypocrites. First was this quote from one of Sony Australia’s managers saying that the Wii was “a bit pricey.” If you’re not laughing, it means that you haven’t been following the next gen console battles and aren’t aware that the Sony Playstation 3 is going to cost six hundred dollars in the US, and, according to the blog post, an even thousand of those funny Australian “dollars”. I heard something about the PS3’s price being reduced, where now in the US it will only cost you 500 bucks and a kidney.

Now, there’s this couple of quotes about the system. Somebody from San Rafael game developer Factor 5 called it the “GameCube 1.5″ and criticized it for not distinguishing itself enough from the previous generation console. Factor 5, you may remember, is the company that built its reputation with Rogue Squadron VIII, also known as Shadows of the Empire 10.5.1, also known as What the Hell, Let’s Do the Death Star Trench Run and Hoth Battle One More Time Because God Knows You Lapped it Up Like Starving Dogs The First Dozen Times We Sold It To You.

It seems pretty clear to me that Nintendo is taking the same tack with the Wii that it did with the Nintendo DS. That is, release an incremental update to the hardware with a fundamental change in the way the games are played.

I was as big a nay-sayer as anybody else when the DS and Sony PSP were first released; the PSP clearly had better hardware (and it still does), a better screen, and was just a better machine overall. And I’ve seen how wrong I was about that. My PSP is now collecting dust, while I still pull out the DS at least once a month. Because Nintendo knows how to make games; there’s always at least one or two classic, must-have titles exclusive to the system. People remember how they played a game, not whether it had a higher resolution than its predecessor.

I’ve got a couple of friends who work for Sony, so I feel kind of bad for saying it, but: there’s no way in hell I’m getting a PS3 anytime soon. This isn’t like when I swore I’d never get an Xbox 360, either; that was just a case of my trying to talk myself out of buying it. My opinion of the PS3 started with my assumption that of course I’d have to buy one, then changed to lack of interest once I saw how capable the Xbox 360 is, then complete lack of interest once I found out how expensive the thing is going to be, and now active contempt.

The contempt comes from the arrogance Sony’s taken in releasing the thing, and their refusal to learn from past mistakes, like with the PSP. The PS3 just seems completely inessential. It’s just prettier versions of the exact same types of games that are already available on the 360 and the PS2. It’s got a DVD player in a format that no one needs yet, because there’s not enough content available for it. And charging that much for an inessential machine just strikes me as arrogant.

Combine that with all the other little criticisms: the batteries in the wireless controller can’t be replaced; the PS3 only works with its own remote and is incompatible with universal remotes because there’s no IR sensor; the online service sounds as if it’s going to be a big, decentralized mess similar to the one that failed on the PS2. I keep getting reminded of the Memory Stick and the UMD — the company’s shoving formats down our throats, trying to sell us what they want us to have, instead of what we actually want.

The whole videogame console business is seeming increasingly irrelevant to me, the less I become an employee and the more I become just a fan. The 360 does everything I want: it’s got a lot of fun games, it’s got an online system that’s so well-designed I still can’t believe it’s from Microsoft, and its DVD player is streamlined enough that I can finally get rid of my old standalone player. The Wii just looks like it’ll be a lot of fun. The PS3 has so little appeal to me that I figure I’m just not their target market. But with as much Sony crap as I’ve already bought and my tendency to spend all my discretionary income on overpriced gadgets, if I’m not the target market, then who the hell is?

The Cartoon Network is airing an animated Hellboy movie called “Hellboy: Sword of Storms” this Saturday at 6:30pm. I’d heard about the series at the local comic book convention last year, but it’d dropped off my radar until seeing it in a magazine this week.

Because it’s 2006, you can find an online production diary for the series in blog format. I haven’t read it yet, part of my stay-completely-unspoiled policy (which is cleverly disguised as having no free time at all).

My knee-jerk impression based on nothing other than the pictures on that blog: it looks like a more standard animation style than trying to do an exact duplicate of Mike Mignola’s style. That could be good or bad; The Amazing Screw-on Head was clearly made by people who were huge fans of the comic book and ended up being a slavish reproduction. It was neat to see my favorite comic book in motion on a major network, or even the Sci-Fi Channel, but at the same time it felt like there was nothing there I hadn’t already seen. And I haven’t seen or heard anything about the continuation of that series, so I’m assuming it didn’t make a huge impression.

Hellboy (apparently it’s intended to be a series) looks like it’s going for a more easily-animated style, and the synopsis of Sword of Storms sounds like it’s faithful to the comics while leaving plenty of room to be an ongoing action-heavy series. If you want to grab the anime market, start your story in Japan: good idea.

At this point, I’m expecting to have the same reaction as I did to the movie: good effort, nice to see the characters in motion, but on the whole basically forgettable. I’m open to being pleasantly surprised, though.

For years I’ve had a list of movies I need to see to become “movie literate.” Mostly they’re ones I don’t particularly want to see, I just feel like I owe it to myself to get more cultured but without all that tedious reading. And I’ve been quoting them for so long, I feel like I owe it to the moviemakers to actually know what I’m talking about.

I may rethink that homework assignment, though, if all the movies suck as much as On the Waterfront. How did this thing ever get to be a classic?

It’s speechy, and ham-handed, and actually pretty gross in its message and characterizations. It acts like there’s this difficult moral ambiguity going on, when there is none. It’s clear from scene one what’s the right thing to do, and you spend almost two hours just waiting for this loathesome, affected idiot to just do it already. It’s insulting to women, because Eva Marie Saint’s character is nothing more than a stupid girl who digs Bad Boys and will abandon any moral compass she supposedly has just to hang out with one.

And it’s got the worst kind of faux-Populist attitude, where a bunch of filmmakers act like they’re down with the Common Man and they understand the honor and code that comes with life on the docks. But the movie shows the people as nothing more than spineless idiots and bums. They’re not regular joes who are put in a difficult position; in this movie, they’re cowards who will stand by while people get murdered right in front of them.

Of course, the whole business with Elia Kazan and the HUAC is pretty gross, too. Especially when he expects us to feel sympathy for this conscienceless moron who says he’s just trying to do the right thing and doesn’t understand why all the guys gotta be so mean to him and kill his pigeons. But the movie’s bad enough even without Kazan’s attempts to make himself out as a martyr.

I really don’t understand the appeal of this one, at all. I even tried to think that it’s all about context, and maybe it was brilliant in its day. But Rear Window came out the same year, proving that Hollywood could tolerate subtle performances, complex plots, and intelligent women. I thought the US was done with ham-handed, insulting “message movies” as soon as Frank Capra stopped making them.

I always thought that Best Picture winners were at least supposed to be watchable, even if they weren’t really enjoyable or even all that good. Now I’m afraid to see A Beautiful Mind.