The title of this post seems like a very ordinary thing. Except that I have not stepped foot in a movie rental store in years. Netflix is second only to Gmail and Flickr in my short short list of Internet sites I cannot live without. But Netflix failed me last night (I know you will argue this claim as your read further).

Dawn came home yesterday and despite her condition, there’s only so much sleeping you can do. She cannot use her left arm and is weighed down my various post op attachments and bandages. Sitting is uncomfortable due to the elevation I assume.

So the likely solution we came up with was to watch movies. I rolled our old 27″ tube TV into the bedroom and looked through our current batch of Netflix movies. Uh-oh.

Alaska IMAX: I really don’t know why I ever put this movie in the queue. It’s been in our house for three weeks now and I haven’t watched it, so no way is Dawn, no matter how bored.

No Country For Old Men: I watched it the other night and while good, far too depressing and violent for Dawn even when she’s not a day out of surgery.

Easter Promises: I had watched about 30 minutes of this movie and could only recall one bloody scene. I know Dawn likes Viggo Mortensen (aka Strider) and so I told her to cover her eyes when he goes to dispose of the dead guy and then I’d come in and watch the rest with her.

About 30 minutes later Dawn called me in, with an expression that was partly tears and partly “what the hell were you thinking?” Apparently, and Dawn has reminded me of this several times in the past 12 hours, I forgot to mention that what also happens in the first 30 minutes is:

1. Someones throat is cut open.
2. A young pregnant girl passes out in a pool of blood.
3. A birth scene where the young girl dies.
4. Then, dead guy gets fingers cut off.

I feel terrible. I don’t know where my head is - I honestly didn’t recall all that stuff happening. After Dawn fell asleep, I watched the rest of Eastern Promises and well I’m glad she stopped it when she did, although Viggo Mortenson does end up fighting completely in the nude (good for Dawn). Of course he also ends up stabbing a knife into a heart, a head and an eye all in that same scene (bad for Dawn).

So with the Netflix queue failing our immediate movie needs, I visited Family Video for the first time. It was a strange experience for me honestly. Not only did it feel like I had been transported back in time, but while browsing I saw hundreds of movies that I’ve never heard of. Tons of crappy movies that never reach my radar since my portal to movies is the Netflix recommendation engine and friends. So thanks to Family Video, I now am aware of movies like Lake Placid 2 and Delta Farce.

Oh and I am now re-acquainted with the concept of “late fees”.

Hopefully the stack I brought back will be void of themes like cutting body parts, pools of blood and pregnancies that end in death. Now taking movie recommendations for Dawn.

From the Onion: Army Holds Annual ‘Bring Your Daughter To War’ Day

Today I got word that Gary Gygax died this past week. When considering how Gary touched my life all I have to do is look at the collection of green poly dice within arms reach on my desk.

I can still recall my first D&D game. It was New Year’s Eve, 1979. I was ten. My parents took my sister and I to a party at their friends house, and all the kids hung out in the basement while the adults partied upstairs. The oldest kid was a teenage boy who had a backpack full of his D&D gear. He convinced us all to play and we spent the evening rolling characters and exploring caves in the module The Keep on the Borderlands.

I was the first to die. I fell into a pit trap at the entrance of one of the caves.

Gary Gygax, with the help of some teenage geek at a New Year’s Eve party, forever changed me. I would spend the next six years on the school bus endlessly flipping through the D&D Monster Manual. I’m not sure why, but studying the dangers of creatures like the Gelatinous Cube just never got old for me.

Thanks for all the adventures Gary - you saved countless kids from boredom.

I just watched The Secret (well actually Dawn watched it while I was writing emails). I found it disappointing in that it seemed to concentrate on wealth.

At one point this guy is talking science and says that the human body can power a whole city for a day. How can I take any advice from a program that claims to have solved the energy crisis but not realized it?

Someone watched The Matrix too many times.

I shut down my portal to the outside world around 1130pm last night, when all the networks where claiming victory for Hillary (based largely on her projected win in California). I arrived at work this morning - after successfully getting my car stuck in the snow, anyone got a shovel? - and got online.

Some are claiming an Obama win.

And others are claiming a Hillary win.

UPDATE:

Thanks Missy for telling me to refresh the second link!  :D

Living In Small Sizes is going on vacation. See you later. We plan on creating some sort of drama to report on when we return.

One of the great things for me to do in Seattle was late night grocery shopping. Squeezed into an urban landscape, at 2am a store can feel strangely deserted and very much like your own. You can roam the isles forever, leaving your cart wherever you dam well please.

And you see the most interesting people!

I think it was the first or second year I moved to Seattle I spotted Kurt Cobain at my QFC (Quality Food Center) on Capital Hill. Although it wasn’t a pretty sight (he did look like a serious heroin addict), that pretty much sealed the deal for me and Saturday nights became my favorite time to shop.

I believe it was a Saturday night grocery excursion when I discovered Sesame Seed Bran Sticks and Organic Pizza Rolls.

When I met Will I discovered he shared my love for nocturnal cuisine cruising. When we moved to Bainbridge Island it was a disappointment for the both of us to find that the T&C (The Town and Country) closed each night at, gasp, 11pm! Actually, this fact would matter little due to the wonderful fact we soon had a child and rarely found ourselves conscious after 10pm. This store got quiet in the late evenings but I always felt like I was being watched. I also got the distinct feeling that the cashiers would really rather I be quick about my shopping business so they could get home.

Now here in Fairfield, I shop at Everybody’s most of the time. It is always a packed who’s who scene. I wade my way through hordes of white wearing people with my itty bitty cart (what is the deal with those tiny carts?!), and have to apologize like five times for blocking someone’s way.

But, tonight. Ah, tonight. Dome time on Maharishi’s birthday. Paradise, a gift from the Maharishi. It was so dead that I could pretend it was midnight. And the music. It was like my own personal Karaoke! And those kids working don’t care what I am doing or how long I take. I celebrated by taking 20 minutes to browse the cosmetic products. While singing, “I want Candy” I picked out some foot creme.

This morning I came across the Indian version of Thriller, which I’ve seen before but is always funny. I dug up a couple other Indian favorites of mine. Thriller and Tunak Tunak Tun (the first and second below) are just whacky and good for a laugh. Chaiyya Chaiyya (the third one) is a great song and the entire video is filmed on a moving train (you might also recognize this song from the Spike Lee’s Inside Man).

My closest friend in Fairfield and a meditator, pointed me to this story about David Lynch’s visit to Germany and the chaos around a misunderstanding of the intent of one of his guest speakers.

Some quick backstory for those who have not heard of the Maharishi’s Invincible America Assembly. Practitioners of Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation program began the Invincible America Assembly with the goal of creating world peace by assembling a permanent group of Yogic Flyers. These Yogic Flyers will fly together in large groups in the domes at the Maharishi University of Management.

According to the Invincible America Assembly:

The by-product of establishing this permanent group would be a coherent influence to bless the nation with invincibility. A large, permanent group of Yogic Flyers has been accomplished and the Invincible America Assembly continues today to generate the influence of coherence for the entire country, in addition to generating more profound experiences in the participants everyday.

Last week David Lynch (a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation) was lecturing in Berlin and invited his friend Raja Emanuel Schiffgens to address the audience. Schiffgens speech sets of the crowd:

These videos were uploaded (and shot I think) by nosedef. Who gives a hysterical blog treatment of the whole event, followed by a reply from David Lynch himself. My favorite part of nosedef’s post is his description of the Raja Emanuel Schiffgens as dressed like the McDonald’s Pope.

What I found most interesting about this scenario was my affirmation in my admiration for the German people. They absolutely do not accept bullshit, and question the intent of any public figure without hesitation. It’s an admiration that I learned while studying German language and culture in college, and feeds my great frustration for the lack of bullshit detecting going on in America, specifically every time Bush or members of his administration take the podium.

Now time for some Yogic Flying.