Weblog Sin Pies

By Charley Daniels

This week I partook of the sweet nectar that is “what everybody else is doing” (versus my usual activity of “mostly working and not much else”). Yes, I picked up a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV: Lord of Illusions and I went and saw Iron Man on opening weekend.

Iron Man made eleventy-billion-ten dollars and seventy-five cents domestically, and five-twenty times that combined with its international numbers. (I know because I work in entertainment journalism, so don’t get too impressed.) Oh, and the $10.75 was from me, thank you very much. So you know it had to be a good movie, even if our particular screening didn’t show the secret scene after the credits.

Grand Theft Auto IV, on the other hand, lets you punch a bitch out for absolutely no reason. If you’re like me, you do this often enough that it actually gets in the way of your trying to do the missions in the game. Like, I’ll need to get from point A to point B — it’s simple really, just go there. But on the way a homeless man asks me for money, so I hit him with a brick. Then the cops come (since when do cops care about homeless people?) and I have to steal a car for a fast getaway, which makes them even more duty-bound to stop me, or whatever. So now I really need to escape, except I’m not very good at driving yet because I’ve spent most of my time hitting people with bricks. It doesn’t help that in my panic I inevitably grab some delivery van or airline luggage cart. So it takes a ton of time to lose the fuzz, and by then I have to go do something in real life, and I can’t finish the original mission: getting from point A to point B.

You learn a lot about yourself from playing this game, which means it’s educational, which means it’s good for kids.

By Charley Daniels

I have a conservative grandfather and I have a liberal grandfather. Neither is what you would call fanatical in his beliefs, but both definitely have an opinion and aren’t afraid to forward it along as an e-mail attachment. Oh yes, my grandfathers took the senior cruise across the digital divide, lingered in the “using e-mail” seminar and then grabbed a nap during the “please don’t forward everything” post-seminar lecture.

Interestingly, I get a lot of the same things from both of them, with slight differences. Replace “Hillary” with “McCain” or “communist” with “racist” or red font with blue font and much of what they send is basically identical. I usually refrain from responding to it, as I hate to encourage them, but a while back I got one that I couldn’t ignore.

It claimed that recently all the schools in the U.K. banned teaching about the holocaust in order to avoid offending Muslim students. There are about a million reasons that immediately flashed through my mind that there’s no way in hell that would happen, but to be be sure I checked a couple places. Turns out I was right, the U.K. didn’t ban teaching the holocaust, although that did happen in one school, apparently.

But boy, this is how prejudice takes off running and keeps on truckin’, isn’t it? My poor grandfather read that and believed it. He’s a really smart guy, too. I once saw him build an airplane out of a rake and some rubber cement. But he believed this forward enough to send it to everyone whose e-mail address he has. The message ended: “How long will it be until we forget about September 11th?” Or some crap like that. Look, no one is forgetting, okay? Who could forget? More importantly, even if the “banning the holocaust from history class” thing were true, that wouldn’t be forgetting. That would be altering curricula to placate the religious beliefs of a certain group, something we’d never do in the U.S., right? Oh, wait…

And sure, people who deny that the holocaust happened are operating on a level of blind faith that I can’t begin to imagine, but so are people who pray to an invisible man who apparently died for our sins (well, for the sins of those who pray, at least) and now lives in a magical, wonderful place where there’s no evil and no pain and free cookies.

There was a point in there somewhere, but I blacked out. I suppose things like this don’t need to have a thesis that’s all neat and tidy. That’s for college kids. Doesn’t the bloggers’ handbook say that you aren’t allowed to conclude a post with a paragraph that begins “In summation…”? This is “take away what you will” prose. What does it mean to you?

In summation, you don’t need to travel to dusty foreign countries to find religious fanaticism running rampant over sacred, government-run institutions. Take a walk around the block.

(By the way, this post had nothing to do with sex. What made you think it should?)

By Charley Daniels

Craigslist: Edit Spaish Website. Must be detail oriented - $40/hr

Spanish. I read a lot of Craigslist postings from companies looking for writers or editors. There’s always something special when the headline proves their need to fill the position.

Oh, and the site needing translation is www.lamejorliposuccion.com, which translates to “The Best Liposuction” (dot com).

By Charley Daniels

I played in the World Poker Tour Celebrity Invitational Saturday and wrote about it for Hollywood Reporter’s Past Deadline blog here.

That little post doesn’t go into much detail about my personal experience at the tournament. I was planning to do more of writeup for this site at some point in the not-too-distant future. “Planning.”

Here’s the short version:

I hung out at the same party, pulling hors devours from the same trays, as some celebrities like Don Cheadle, Jennifer Tilly, James Woods, the guy who played “Donkey Lips” in Nickelodeon’s Salute Your Shorts, Corey Feldman, Montel Williams. The list goes on. More importantly, I was drinking beer delivered by the same cocktail servers as those drunk by poker players like Erick Lindgren, Gavin Smith, Amnon Filippi, Antonio Esfandiari, Daniel Alaei. The list goes on. Yes, me. Charley Daniels from Grants Pass, Orygun. Rubbing elbows, etc. I made eye contact with Norm Macdonald.

It was a cool night. My table was a little boring on the celebrity front. Best we could do was former Miss USA Shandi something-or-other (apparently she’s best known for her stint on Dancing With the Stars) and Andrew Firestone, who sat right next to me and said he was there because he was on “some reality show.” The topic came up because I asked him if he hangs at the Peet’s on Larchmont. He doesn’t. I see a lookalike there sometimes. Very nice guy. Firestone, not the guy who looks like him. Well, maybe that guy’s nice. I don’t know him like I now know Andy F. And I don’t judge him even though he was not only on The Bachelor, he was The Bachelor — or one of them at least. As Isabelle puts it, he was the only normal bachelor. That makes sense. In an Isabelle sort of way.

Bit of poker talk below the fold (this is my new way of saying “after the jump.” It’s newspaper jargon, even though “news” isn’t even on the list of things this site knows the definition of).

(Continued)

By Charley Daniels

I spend a good deal of time assuming that our next president will be an order of magnitude better than our current president. Which is fine, since I also spend a good deal of time realizing that that probably isn’t true and our president will likely always leave something to be desired, and by that I mean I’ll almost certainly have to vote for the least bad of two people I probably wouldn’t even trust to run a wet T-shirt contest.

But maybe I shouldn’t be so critical of the candidates, especially since when it comes down to it, if I were a Democrat on the fence during primary season, this might help me decide:

And if it did help me decide, would that make my vote count any less? Would that make the title any less important to the person who is elected?

This may not be an official product of the Hillary Clinton campaign, but if it’s not it’s genius negative publicity, so the opposition gets points for that.