Spoilers a Spoilin’ to Spoil the Spoils
Spoiler alert.
Welp. I finally did it. I went and saw the Star Wars.
I think I waited the right amount of time. There were only 12 people in the theater including one annoying brat. These days that qualifies as the best moviegoing experience of all time. Even so, we still defied the odds and had one of the glowing-screen folk in our midst. Who says you can’t have it all?
If you haven’t seen the movie yet you might want to leave now. And hates you, I do.
The Year In Re-Doo-Doo
I ain’t got the time or the inclination to make another year in review video. Maybe next year. Until then I’m recycling this garbage from two years ago. Use your God-given powers of imagination and relive 2014 Shouts From The Abyss classic moments like these:
I’d like to buy a bowel
Today a story straight from the bowels of Yelp as discovered by yours truly.
You might think “yelp” is one of those made-up words so trendy among tech companies. You know, those words formed by taking two other words and jamming them uncomfortably together like a sequence from Sesame Street.
“Yellow.”
“Pee.”
“Yellow.”
“Pee.”
“Yel-pee.”
“Yel-pee.”
“Yel-p.”
“Yel-p.”
“Yelp.”
“Yelp.”
Alas, no, it didn’t go down like that. It turns out that “yelp” is an actual real word. It’s even in the dictionary and stuff. I looked.
yelp
noun
: a short sharp cry, esp. of pain or alarm
Wow. What a perfect principle to embody in a site that allows regular people like you and me to offer up our opinions on restaurants and businesses. By definition, they are expected to be short cries of pain and alarm.
Thanks, Yelp! Gotcha covered. š
Today’s true story is something that happened in the world of Yelp. No, it’s not that exciting.
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Movie Review: Captain Phillips
Ever since I first heard that James Cameron was down in Mexico building a full scale movie set of theĀ Titanic I said to myself, like every other living thing did, “This movie isn’t going to end well.”
Anyone who’d ever heard about theĀ Titanic knew that, at some point, the ship was going to sink. Or maybe not. In Hollywood “based on a true story” often means very little. Perhaps in Cameron’s movie the ship would avoid the berg, then slowly rise out of the water and fly off into outer space in search of the aliens from the movieĀ The Abyss. Snap! He could have invented the “alternate timeline” cheat long before J.J. Abrams flared his lens all over that shit.
The movieĀ Captain Phillips presents a similar problem. It opens with Phillips as a prisoner, surrounded by pirates wielding AK-47 machine guns all over the place, and our protagonist hogtied and covered with blood.
Has Captain Phillips already been shot? Does he live? Does he die? Is this going to be one of those flashback thingies?
Spoiler alert: He went on to write a book about the experience. The movie is based on the book. Something tells me he’s gonna pull through. So much for the dramatic tension of the opening scene.
If, like me, you’ve been breathlessly waiting for a big screen treatment of what it’s really like on one of those big container ships, you are in for a real treat.
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Guru Movie View: The Paperboy
Movie still provided by Millennium Films. Copyright MXVIIVXIIMM. All rights reserved.
I don’t normally review movies as this space is reserved for more critical thoughts. This is a much needed one time exception. But I refuse to call this a “review.” I’m not going to re-view this shit ever again. -Ed.
Oops. Did the preceding comment give too much away? It was merely supposed to be a fluff piece of exposition to establish foundation. Spoiler alert. My bad. You might say I didn’t like this movie much. Now I’m going to spend some time trying to convince you why. If you like being pathetic and having absolutely no shame, read on with me, won’t you?
Nothing is worse than having a Netflix full of steaming streaming content. And yet there I was on the sofa, seven remote controls balanced carefully on my belly, and pounding my skull repeatedly with a hammer.
In that vein, I enthusiastically decided to queue upĀ The Paperboy. I wasn’t quite ready to put my hand in the garbage disposal yet. At least, I hoped, someone was going to spread that paper on the floor and some business would get done. (Poop tag earned.)
Prima facie, the movie is presented to the public ostensibly as an “entertainment.”
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Staff Infection Meeting
I once quit a job over a staff meeting. True story. I’m sure it’s documented here on the blog somewhere, but long story short, they made us on the 6am crew stick around for a 5pm meeting. I asked, “Is it important?” Our managers assured us it was. “YouĀ have to be there,” they said.
The meeting started and the first item of business was rolling out birthday cake for our safety director. At 5-fucking-o-clock. It’s not like most of us would be consuming dinner any time soon.
Then, for the icing on the cake, the rest of the hour was consumed by our managers reading memos to us. Line-by-line. Word-by-word. Like we were in kindergarten or something. Memos that had previously been delivered to our inboxes. Memos I had already read on my very own. It was worse than an insult to our intelligence. It was calling us babies.
After the meeting I opted to go back to my desk rather than heading straight home. I sat there and wrote out a memorandum of my own. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. It’s a classic piece of Americana called theĀ letter of resignation. I plopped that puppy on my manager’s desk and then called it day.
Good times.
In another place and another time there was another staff meeting. This one involved the quintessential management tool known as the employee survey.
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