That's right, I said bossest

You know, I'm gonna go on record and say that this group of people could quite conceivably come together to create one of the bossest Thanksgiving Day tables of all time. (This is, of course, operating on the assumption that Wikipedia would never lie to me about the interconnectedness of famous people.) So, without further ado:

Invitee #1: Beck, a musician-poet who transcends genres even as he re-invents them. Conveniently married to --

Invitee #2: Marissa Ribisi, best known to me as the red-headed girl from Dazed and Confused that gets Matthew McConaughey's attention.  She is otherwise known as the twin sister of --

Invitee #3: Giovanni Ribisi, a guy who is thisclose to being Leonardo DiCaprio. Seriously -- who else on the planet can put on their resume that they survived teen idol status on a late-80's/early 90's sitcom, only to go on to star in a James Cameron blockbuster? Do My Two Dads and Avatar ring a bell? Then, let's say he decides to get together with a guy he's known at least since high school --

Invitee #4: Ethan Suplee, the genius who portrays one of the most lovable idiots in TV history, Randy Hickey. Watch this YouTube clip (starting at about the 1 minute mark), and tell me you couldn't find something to talk about with this guy. (I also marvel that he makes me want to watch Without a Paddle.) He is married to --

Invitee #5: Brandy Lewis. Of her I know nothing, except that she is married to Ethan Suplee, and (more surprisingly) is the sister of --

Invitee #6: Juliette Lewis, who has always struck me as just plain old batshit insane. You know, in an intriguingly attractive sorta way, but still, bat-guts nuts. I remember talking about her when I was in university -- I didn't get the feeling she was a particularly versatile actress, but man, her agent was the hardest-workin' man in show business. Our compare and contrast example was Lara Flynn Boyle -- she managed to parlay her role on the cult show Twin Peaks into the '93/'94 murderer's row of The Temp, Threesome and Baby's Day Out (with the slight mitigation of a bit part in Wayne's World and the apparently underappreciated Red Rock West). Ms. Lewis' agent, on the other hand, turned roles on such immortal TV fare as I Married Dora and A Family for Joe into a goldmine. There's too much to keep in paragraph format, I gotta go to plaid and make a list here:

• Cape Fear (1991)
• Husbands and Wives (1992)
• That Night (1992)
• Kalifornia (1993)
• Romeo Is Bleeding (1993)
• What's Eating Gilbert Grape
• Natural Born Killers (1994)
• Mixed Nuts (1994)
• The Basketball Diaries (1995)
• Strange Days (1995)
• From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)  

 So, before her 25th birthday, she'd worked with Martin Scorcese, Woody Allen, Lasse Hallstrom, Oliver Stone, Nora Ephron, Kathryn Bigelow, and Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez. As of last count, that's 20 Best Director Academy Award nominations (with 5 wins) and 28 Best Screenplay Oscar Nominations (good for 4 gold statues). That is one hell of a star-studded run. I recommend her agent to anyone.

So yeah. To get back to my original point, if ever I tried to come up with a hypothetical who-would-you-invite-to-a-celebrity-fantasy-dinner-party guest list, this group of six will gain a substantial amount of bonus points on sheer plausibility.

Braggin', kinda

Reason #462 to stay friendly with your exes:

So when they find cool stuff of yours that got hidden away in a box when everybody did the uncomfortable move-out thing years ago, they actually seek you out to give it back to you, rather than ditch it.

Life ain't so bad.

Apocalypse Soon

What the heck, here's another screed from the past, somewhere around June of 2008. A buddy of mine emailed out a link, to which another buddy replied, "I LOVE THAT GUY'S SHIRT!" This is what I came up with.

Okay -- I'd already looked at this video, had my little chuckle, and moved on with my life. Then, love is professed for the guy's shirt. Any of you who know me know that fashion and it's applications are not the first things I notice, so I had no idea what this guy's shirt looked like. Curiosity got the better of me, and I had to know what incited the gushing and the caps-lock. I took another look at the video, and yes, I agree, that is a most fetching outfit that dude has on, especially if this is 1982.

However -- as I mentioned above, fashion is not usually enough to hold my focus, and as I'd already seen this particular video, my gnat-like attention span kicked in and my eyes started to wander. So, this guy has apparently done other humorous videos that were housed on the same site. You don't say? I clicked on a couple of them, and one of them was a vignette entitled, 'How To Break Up With A Chubby Girlfriend,' and it basically was three minutes of all the worst things you could do in that situation, but funny. (Well, funny-ish.) It was on this innocuous page, however, that I learned two things -- one, that the apocalypse is imminent, and two, however it happens, we have no need to fear that it will be because the computers rise up and take over (a la The Matrix or The Terminator).

There were Google ads on the page, and I am now confident that computers will never take over the world for this reason -- they have no sense of humour and they take everything too literally. The name of the page included the words 'Break-Up' and 'Chubby,' so the Google ads featured sites aimed at people who were breaking up with chubby people, not understanding that the people who land on a humour site are rarely actually looking for advice. However -- while we are safe from the wrath of ones and zeroes, the end is nigh, because there were not one, but two ads promising that you could, 'Get Your Ex Back In As Little As 2 Days.' (There was also an ad for those who wished to 'Find Local Gay Chubby Men Near You,' and I must admit I could not click on the link, and the main reason was that I did not want the URL http://www.gaychubbydating.com/ to show up in my browsing history. I live alone, no-one would care, I could just clear the history right away, for crying out loud, but no, I dared not click. I don't know what it says about me that the fact that they were chubby and gay was much more daunting than if they were just one or the other.)

I clicked on these two Get Your Ex Back links, and the first one left me awed. Definitely aimed at men only, and written as if women and relationships were roughly as complicated as VCR repair. For the low low price of $47, you can learn:

• The quick 2-step formula to stop all arguments and show your ex that you have a happy future together. (Page 92)
• How to make her laugh with you, and have her appreciate you again. Here's why it works... give your ex the proper kind of teasing and make her laugh, and she'll be psychologically unable to dislike you anymore. (Page 72), and my personal favourite.
• The 5-step Seduction System that takes you from having an 'innocent' cup of coffee with your ex-girlfriend... to having her moan 'I want you inside me now' as she drags you to bed... in just one evening! (Page 88)

The second link was a little less gender-specific, a bargain at $29.95, and a little more concerned with the whole world being happy and in love as opposed to just guys gettin' to do it with whomever they pleased, but still, it was also close to unbearably slimy. The oddest section is where they list the predicaments that their program offers remedies for. There are the standard, 'Still together, your spouse is cheating,' and 'Still together, fights have driven you and your spouse apart,' but that was only the tip of the iceberg. They also offer to help you with the slightly less common problems of, 'Separated but your spouse won't ever make time for a date,' 'Together but one person has a terminal disease,' and what has to be the granddaddy of relationship hurdles, 'You were sentenced to prison for ten years.'

I admit, I have come to rely on the internet for far too much of my everyday life (entertainment, knowledge, communication, what-have-you), but this seems to be asking a bit much.