Template headers

I've been playing around with different template headers for the last couple of months. I think I've finally settled on the one you see now. It's cropped from a painting by British pop artist David Hockney titled Portrait of Nick Wilder. The subject looks like he could be exquisitely bored. It seems to fit this blog.

Here are the various headers I've tried out, and some I never used. If you use a Blogger Template with a 760 x 200 header (I use Kubrick for Blogger), these are ready to go.

If anything, this makes for a nice looking post!

Happy birthday, Kurt Vonnegut

It's Kurt Vonnegut's birthday. The irony of his being born on Veteran's Day is not lost on him, I'm sure. Vonnegut is, of course, the author of one of the great, American anti-war novels, Slaughterhouse-Five. A Purple Heart recipient, Vonnegut was an advance scout with the U.S. 106th Infantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge. He witnessed, first-hand, the bombing of the once beautiful city Dresden, Germany, while being held as a prisoner of war.
Dresden, before and after

Thanks, Adolf (look what you forced us to do)! So it goes.

Favorite Vonnegut novels (in no particular order) are:


Poo-tee-weet

Bass ackwards

Other than to be different, just for the sake of being different, or to try and irritate "traditionalists" like myself, what's the point of this?:

"Upside-down Christmas trees gain popularity"
Folks, this is just plain stupid. Am I right? When did it start?

This one'll cost you $600:
Retailers are selling out(!), apparently, according to this story broadcast on NPR, Wednesday.

Some people may just use them for general decoration, while using a "normal" tree as the main one. Still, I don't think I'd ever get used to seeing it. I would always be reminded of:

It's a Communist plot.

A random bunch o' pics

Pointless? Perhaps.

Movies that shouldn't have been released, but were...wait, were they?

Were these two movies ever released???

I could've sworn I saw a coming attraction for this on television. It appeared to be a film about angry restaurant employees spitting in their customers' food. Perhaps the restaurant industry/lobby somehow had it quietly removed from the small number of theaters into which it was unleashed.

I saw coming attractions for this one in the theaters, so I'm sure it exists. It must be horrible, because it appears to have vanished from the face of the earth. Has Matthew McConaughey ever been in a "good" movie (other than Dazed and Confused)? I can forgive Pacino for Bobby Deerfield (1977), Cruising (1980), Author! Author! (1982), Revolution (1985), Heat (1995), The Devil's Advocate (1997), and (yikes! He was in Gigli???) Gigli (2003) because of and

"If a body meet a body, coming through the rye..."

Ain't It Cool News is reporting, via Variety, that actor Jared Leto has been cast in the role of Mark David Chapman in a movie titled Chapter 27. Actress/blog fodder Lindsay Lohan has been cast in a role, as well. Chapman is the man who shot John Lennon shortly after receiving an autograph from the former Beatle.


The title is most likely a reference to the fact Chapman, being the disturbed person he was, sat down and read from The Catcher in the Rye only seconds after killing Lennon. The classic J.D. Salinger novel only has twenty-six chapters. Chapman is said to have seen himself as a sort of Holden Caufield (the novel's protagonist). Holden hated phony people, and Chapman believed Lennon was a phony who'd betrayed the values he appeared to promote in songs such as "All You Need Is Love" and "Imagine".

It's sad that we glorify creeps like Chapman by devoting a film to him. I guess our interest in things like that come from the same impulse we have to slow down while driving past a traffic accident.

Last Star Wars movie released on DVD

As Revenge of the Sith comes out today on DVD, many involved in the making of the Star Wars movies have mixed emotions. Producer Rick McCallum shares his "nightmare": "...since George loves to tinker with his films, one day when I'm old he'll wake me and say (speaks in an old voice), 'It's time to rework Star Wars — one ... more ... time.' ".

Here is a nice, similarly tinged with emotion, overview of the DVD from Obi-Swan at Ain't It Cool News.

“At last we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi. At last we will have revenge.”