Shouting Grounds

Well…Friday I waited in line for over 2 hours to finally give ‘ol Steve some of my hard-earned dosh. I’ve bought Apple products before, but unless I’ve given them as gifts, never kept the fucking thing. This is the first Apple product that I bought for MJS exclusively… I’ll recount the experience before I weigh in on my first 72 hours with the product.

The cats in Cupertino decreed that the new 3G iPhone could only be bought in Apple and AT&T stores starting at 8a on Friday. Guaranteed lines of zealots at the Apple stores…prompting me to think that I’d be safe arriving an hour early to an AT&T store mere miles from an Apple store. Not so much. At 7a there were 35 people in front of me…and every single fuck around me had an EDGE iPhone. I’m not exaggerating. Every goddamn person had a 1-year old, perfect-working-condition iPhone.

Now…I’m moving up from a Samsung a900 on Sprint, so the iPhone is whole milk to me. But I’ve spent some time with the EDGE iPhone and don’t find it to be incredibly handicapped compared to the 3G. The web access is faster, but all iPhones will get the 2.0 software…so we’ll be on a nearly-level playing field from what I can see. The most obvious advantage being that my phone was “only” $199, whereas the earliest adopters got horn-fucked last year.

Back to the lines. AT&T had deployed some Zealot Wranglers to keep the natives in czech, trained in the fine art of counter-intel. The agent for our portion of line was particularly vicious…claiming illogically that she was incapable of counting how many iPhones were available for purchase and beckoning everyone to eschew their jobs and stay in line no matter what happened. Luckily I was able to forward the trouble phone to my cell and remain away from the office until I had blown my wad…others were not so lucky. Two seething and sweaty IT pro’s in line behind me couldn’t handle the pressure and rolled out of the firing line mere minutes before I secured my prize.

With regards to the process, Apple screwed the pooch in my opinion. Last year some anti-zealots hacked their phones and whatever…so this year’s plan was to activate at the store on purchase. That plan will probably be fine after a few weeks…no so much on Friday. The entire central time zone was struggling to activate through iTunes starting at 8a. Case in point, it took the first guy in line over 30 minutes to reemerge with his activated phone. Luckily for us, the AT&T order-takers quickly decided to dump the activate procedure and I got my phone activation-free. And thus the activation process took about 3 minutes later on in the day.

So…you’re saying “MJS, how’s the fuckin phone?”

Pretty goddamn swell. I tried to give it a well rounded rinse over the weekend: making some long-distance calls, listening to a podcast (thousand cuts, y’all), watching a trailer, downloading some free apps from the new apps store, using google maps to find a Panera Bread, etc. Good shit. About half of my interweb browsing was done via my home wifi, but I was most impressed by how quickly the phone hopped from wifi to 3G to Edge when the signal strength demanded it. Definitely some quality there.

I’m impressed so far, and I’m certainly finding every reason to use the thing. However, I vow not to become the asshat zealot that will whip out the phone to counter a pilot when he claims our plane is delayed due to weather. Fuck him.

Video tutorial: unlock iphone

Usually, I’m bigass cynical bastard when it comes to network TV…just ask Redscape. But a review from someone whose opinion I trust, and seeing that the show has made it into season two does something to peak my interest. And ho! The show in question features one of the greatest actors of all time, Bruce “Fucking” Campbell!

The quick and dirty from IMDb: “A spy recently disavowed by the US Government uses his Special Ops training to help others in trouble.”

Okay, so the show is topped with the typical network shredded cheese. There’s some annoying characters surrounding our hero meant to develop his humanity, etc. Every ep features a short sequence or two where Michael (hero) needs to create a small spy device or something from commonly available items in the classic McGyver style. Each episode tells a self-contained story, wrapped in a larger (and more interesting) arc.

On the whole, Burn Notice is not much more than an updated Knight Rider without the sweet eightiesmobile with a thin spray of McGyver over top. The show does have a pretty great style, and the femme primero is a hawtie that Redscape might recognize as a friend of Col. Frank Slade.

Honestly, I think I’m just looking for something to watch now that BSG is on another retardedly-long break, and FX doesn’t know when the fuck they’re going to continue the second and third best network TV shows (The Shield and Rescue Me)… Sometimes the cheese starts to stink, but like I said…it’s got a cool style and is mostly fun to watch. Bruce Campbell’s great as always.

MagicJohnStone for “Burn Notice” –

Whilst on the road for work this week, I decided to torture myself a little by watching John Rambo, or First Blood: Part II, or just Rambo if you like. Don’t bother.

First thought: Sly is grotesque. He’s already publicly admitted to using steroids and HGH, even recommending that older, living action figures like himself turn to horse meds to make themselves titans. Someone should nudge him and tell him he’s starting to look like Jabba the Hut.

Before (circa Rambo III) & After (now)

C’mon right? How does he not start to wonder if he made the right decision when he has to have his t-shirt’s tailored to have a 44″ collar? When he talks it looks like he’s got a mouth full of peanut butter!

Back to the movie, 3% decent, 97% dogshit. While I’m all about gruesome deaths, this movie was just comical. They had to have used Bryan Brown and Brian Dennehy to do the gore effects, as every single one jumped off the screen as obvious CG. The fucks didn’t even try to blend the CG into the scene to make it look realistic, making any CG look more like cell-shaded art ala Roger Rabbit.

The story was silly, some righteous missionaries try to teach the Burmese the missionary position and end up getting captured, having already been warned by Rambo (who’s still wallowing in Thailand, fishing for the locals) not to bother in Burma. Rambo leaps to action and kills everyone. Yawn.

The 3% good came in when they actually tried to tie into the magic of the first movie. One of the missionistas actually manages to get more than just a moan and a stare from Rambo with some questions, and tries to talk him into going home to AZ, USA, to visit his family finally (do they still think he’s in Nam?). Tacked onto the end, he’s actually done it and returned to America. Wearing the same giddup and carrying the same duffel from when Dennehy started the whole shit off with him in the 80′s. Walking Bruce Bixby-style to his home. Too bad they didn’t expand this 3% to offset the shit that made up the rest of the movie.

So,
Magic John Stone for Rambo:

yay!

yay! It’s been a long time since I posted, so I figured this would be a good post to get back on the wagon with.

It was pretty badass to run through the Soldier Field concourse and through the actual gate that the Bears use on gameday, onto the grass and out to the 50.The adrenaline rush was unparalleled.

And with that, I’m buttoning up my distance running for the summer. I still plan to run for fitness and such, but no more training for long distance this year. Gonna focus on other things.

again…yay!

Fresh off the press from our favorite fear-machine! CNN has a new ‘feature’ called “CNN T-Shirt“. If you czech out the headlines under “Latest News”, you’ll see some of the stories have the little camera icon next to them, sure to deliver about 90 seconds of commercials and 30 seconds of news. Nothing new right? Well today I see a little t-shirt icon next to that one. Clicked on it and get this Total Bullshit (TM) new idea…CNN T-Shirt. Apparently you can order a shirt in your choice of size, color and sex…with the headline and the timestamp of when it happened.

Okay…are you really fucking kidding me? Try this one on, dumbshits:

I love the scene where Danny Trejo’s shooting at the car FOREVER

In altering my workout routine, I haven’t been able to have my morning drip-coffee because I go directly from the gym to the car to work…so I’ve been buying coffee en route. Despite my better judgement, I’ve paid an exorbitant amount of money a few times for a Grande Skinny Vanilla Latte from Starbucks. Last week I noticed Seattle’s finest changed their cup logos to something completely perverse. The usual green circle has gone brown (surprising since everyone and their mother are trying to project a ‘green’ image all the sudden), and the image of the mermaid has been pulled back to reveal her full glory…glory hole that is. The little tart is now completely spread eagle, pushing her goods on the whole world. And I mean all the goods, jugs too. She’s even holding her ankles for maximum obtusion! WHORE! Who’s ever seen a mermaid with a split tail anyway? Can she walk on land?

Wildly Popular ‘Iron Man’ Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film

PSA from MJS: Websites that use canned, politically correct clipart images of people sitting in boardrooms happily agreeing that they’re real job is shitty should be fucking torn down. If you want to put an image of people on your company’s website, use images of people that actually FUCKING WORK THERE!

That’s all.

Charlton Heston passed away tonight at the age of 84…

It goes without saying that no one will ever play Moses, fight the damned dirty Apes or give Harry Tasker work quite like he did.

In an effort to saturate the Grounds with movie reviews, I’ve been combing the *ahem* libraries for some golden oldies. This time around, it’s George Romero’s Creepshow. I remember this movie from when I was a wee lad, and that it both intrigued me enough to watch it over and over again and that it scared the shit outta me. I’ll slice this review up to follow the serial nature of the movie, so follow along…minor spoilers ahead

Father’s Day
Not as creepy now as it once was. A group of smarmy republicans assemble every Father’s Day to honor their dead grandfather, who was rumored to have been killed by their mother with a marble ashtray because all the fucker did was bang on his chair with a heavy cane screaming and calling her Bitch all the time, complaining that they’re all just after his cash. If you ask me the fucker got what he deserved… In the end, it’s not as scary as it used to be. Satisfying though.

The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill
Stephen King (who wrote the stories) stars as a hillbilly’s hillbilly that finds a meteor on his land. Everything the meteor touches (or touches it in the case of King) begins to quickly overgrow with some eerie-ass grass…and not the smoking kind. While he begins to turn into a Chia Pet, he dreams about selling the meteor off to a local college to pay off his debts. More quirky than scary.

Something to Tide You Over
An old school tour de force, starring Leslie Neilsen and Ted Danson. Ted’s sleeping with Leslie’s wife, and Leslie wants revenge. Again, I can’t blame him. He’s got a strange CCTV fetish and a love for the tide. Probably my second favorite of the five serials.

The Crate
A couple of buddy professors secretly loath the ultra-controlling drunkass whore wife that one of them was unlucky enough to marry…to the point where the dumbass married to her daydreams about killing her. One day, a janitor at the college they teach at finds a crate hidden under a stairwell marked “Arctic Expedition, 1854″, all hell literally breaks loose. My favorite of the five stories.

They’re Creeping Up On You
EG Marshall is a particularly annoying SuperRepublican, living alone in a spartan apartment built to seal out pollution, germs and bugs. He obsesses about cleanliness while screaming at people on the phone, ordering them around and buying up companies. He gets his…and this story was the hardest for me to watch when I was young. An telltale quote, said by a woman’s voice on the phone to EG, “I hope you get cancer in the worst place!”

The best part of the movie is the way Romero mixed in the serial comic content with the live action content, tying the stories together with a short story about a kid killing his shitty dad. Each of the stories use comic-cell style overlays and crazy lighting throughout to link the comics to the live action…good stuff. Also you’ll notice that in each story, the people that meet their end have it coming, while the protagonists are usually people you also loathe…which in a way makes the world the stories are based in a little easier to believe, i.e. everyone’s human.

Arousal Factor – Magic John Stone for Creepshow – Snapped to Attention

Personal achievement Magic John Stone! This past Sunday was the Shamrock Shuffle 8K (5mi for us Americanos) here in Chicago. The weather was overcast, spitting rain and about 40 degrees, but thousands of people showed up to run the streets.

What a goddamn rush, man. Standing in the queue waiting to run, running up Columbus under the silver bridge at Millennium Park while people cheered us on, all of us yelling while running up lower Columbus, the little Italian woman on Grand that was yelling “Bravo!” to all the runners, running across the Chicago river, down State street past the Chicago theater and Macy’s, getting more Gatorade on my face than in my mouth, dodging the people who stopped to walk, never stopping to walk and sprinting the last 1/4 mile after turning off of Roosevelt…finishing a full 2m28s faster than my previous best 5mi time. Fucking priceless.

If you’ve never run a race, I HIGHLY recommend setting out a training plan and getting your ass out to beat the streets. Go get some great shoes and make it happen. After only three months, I’m a believer. If you had told me last New Year’s Eve that I’d be running now, I’d have laughed my ass off.

Next up: the Soldier Field 10 Mile on May 24th, a 10mi round-tripper down LSD starting outside and finishing on the 50-yard line of Soldier Field! Fuck yeah!

Cruising my daily bookmarks, I snapped up this article from Bit-Tech.net. First reactions included “I’ve never heard of Battlefield Heroes!” and “who the hell makes a game with only 2 maps?” Then I see this paragraph:

Though the game, which is being developed by DICE, is still being planned as an utterly free-to-play game which will generate profit through micro-transactions the developers still aren’t trying to create a huge selection of playing fields.

“EGAD…MORE EA BULLSHIT!!!” the little Irish Devil in my head screamed. Apparently they’re intent on finding new and interesting ways to wring the awesomeness out of one of my favorite franchises. “AND JUST LOOK AT HOW COMPLETELY THEY’VE RIPPED OFF TF2!” he continued. Needless to say, my head was spinning…and yet I googled myself over to EA’s official BF Heroes page to either A) find more reasons to hate this game or B) find out what the fuck, if anything, I could like about a supposedly free game.

The first page of the site says all the right things…but as with any page that has an EA logo at the bottom, you can usually just wipe your ass with it. “a fun cartoon-style shooter”…blah blah blah…”It will be released for the PC as a free download”…blah blah fuckin blah. However I still can’t shake the feeling that this might turn out to be something awesome. Onto the video page for some motion-based proof!

Holy shit! Yeah it’s an EA game, yeah it’s only got two maps, yeah I’m sure they’re gonna make you pay through the nose via micro-transactions for weapons, vehicles, maps, etc…but goddamn the video makes it look fun as shit. I want Socrates to sit on the wing of a P51 while I dive bomb some mother fuckers!

No doubt my heart will be not only ripped from my chest, but shat on, microwaved and fed to a Republican. But for the day I’m giddy about playing this game…and I think you should be too. But then again…

Video