Going to Massachusetts

Top Ten Experiences Whilst Living in Los Angeles

10) The Vinnie Jones experience in WeHo

9) All the Vince Vaughn encounters before he crossed over to the dark side.
8) Coachella '07
7) The drunkest nights on Bay St. and Grant St. when everyone lived near each other (vodka jello shots) and the stoniest nights on Masselin and Swall...the details blend together.
6) Celtics championship over the Lakers/fighting Tim (lefty)
5) 2 incidents outside of Sonny McClean's, one drug-related and one ...well, both absurdly random and inappropriate
4) First trip to Vegas for Epsilon Reunion (lost tons of cash on 3-card poker but still fun)
3) Rich guy b-day party featuring all you can eat sushi and an amazing girl-to-guy ratio including Zeus from No Holds Barred

2) That first pot-search with McA, scouring the UCLA campus for the Sammy chapter and succeeding quite nicely
1) Pad Thai, Happy Endings, Love Lockdown, downtown rooftop hottubbing, CDR Tuesdays, some Canadian l'ass, 420 Delivery service, and meeting Lovett, Aloni, and Miller in the same night.

It's been a wild ride.

Stay tuned for the next chapter, and if you're really bored, I'll be tweeting from the road. Likely you'll see inspired posts like "Wow this state is flat and boring and smells like tinkle," or "Busted flat in Baton Rouge...I guess I live here now." Hey, that was actually funny. Wasn't it?

twitter.com/SamsoniteX

Zach and Bradley

If you've been getting revved up for the summer comedy THE HANGOVER, this new webisode of Between Two Ferns should help wet your palette for what I'm hoping is going to be a laughfest and a half.

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis from Between Two Ferns

"Breaking Bad"

BRomine and BArium...if anyone was wondering. Crystal Methamphetamine = C₁₀H₁₅N^. So no, they don't correlate.

<sup>The title refers to likable antihero Walter White (Bryan Cranston), whose metaphysical (I'm not qualified to use that word but fuck it) wave breaks when he finds out he's got some bad lung cancer...and it breaks bad, as he uses his Chemist superbrain to come up with a great recipe for crank and slowly becomes the meth kingpin of Albuquerque, NM.

What's amazingly pertinent about this show is its portrayal of the Mexican cartels that keep popping up in the news (Sidenote, they rake in about $8 billion a year on pot; wouldn't you rather that money go to our economy? dumb-dee-dumb dumb dumb). They're turning my namesake Arizona city into New Juarez. I take offense, as usual.</sup>

"It's just basic chemistry, yo."-Jesse Pinkman

And along comes a woman, helping make a troubling situation much worse. But that's just what babes like Jane (Krysten Ritter) do. Tonight's episode propels that argument based on the already-in (p)reviews I've seen.

But at the heart of this Coen-brothers-esque story of drug wars, family breakdowns, and uneccessary violence is the ancient conflict of MAN VS HIMSELF.

Walter has accepted an inevitable death after a life he sees as unacceptable, cowardly, and trite, despite having known true love and produced a good son (with a new daughter about to pop out). Now, his good intentions do what good intentions were born to do: create havoc and turn to shit.
To paraphrase one review (ign.com, I think), he is using the illegal narcotics trade to benefit his family without concern for the adverse affects of his crystal product on the many other families that the drug will trickle down to. This amounts to blind self-centered-ness that isn't quite greed and really isn't at all noble, though I take the side of Walter because it's nice to be able to do things your own way once liberated by the impending forecast of your own mortality.

However now that we have found out his cancer is getting 'better' and his chances for survival have largely increased, he seems to trick himself into believing that since the trian is already rolling, and the adventurous danger levels rise, he is happy to keep conducting, showing outward signs of maliciousness when his terf is threatened, even when his authority is questioned by his D.E.A. brother-in-law regarding letting his 16-year-old son gulp down tequila at a family pool party (and I agree with all the other reviews when I say that the tension in that scene was outrageously fucking convincing). Cranston certainly deserved his Emmy for that, though the Emmy came first.

Without getting too in-depth, my predictions for the way the season ends involve the deaths of 2 of our non-White (family) characters, which will blatantly show the viewers that Walt's grand plan is a failure, not because he isn't making the loot he needs to leave his family with, but because these casualties (and there've already been a few) were avoidable. But in the cartel business, life is cheap and the product is what matters. You lose a few soldiers, the war wages on, and everybody with their lighter to the pipe gets to dream ignorantly while their mind dies and the world around them crumbles. Let's just hope this isn't too precognitive for the lives of the many who live on the border between the States' (organized ineffective and obtuse law) and the Cartels' (lawless, effective, and epidemically terminal).

We're all just waiting for that moment when Hank (D.E.A.) discovers the mystery man they're after is his once-spineless, mild-mannered to a fault brother Walt. Someone will end up with more than just egg on his face and/or cuffs on his wrists.

You can win little by little, but it takes no time to lose it all.

Memorial Day Addendum: Here's an interesting synopsis/review of last night's episode:
http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/05/breaking_bad_phoenix_throwing.html
and a podcast with the creator and a writer:
http://podcast.amctv.com/breaking-bad/breaking-bad-insider-212.mp3
Links:
http://www.waltswarning.com/
http://www.amctv.com/originals/breakingbad/
one SEXY Bad girl

Talkin bout some 'Heisenberg'

BREAKING BAD REVIEW, COMING AFTER TONIGHT'S EPISODE: "PHOENIX"

for your health

Ludes, Whip-its, and carpentry

It's still weird seeing him do this visually since I grew up listening to a bootleg cassette of it. I wonder where that went...here's a cool little story I read about how this stand-up routine came to fruition.

After a childhood in the 1960s, Leary went to Emerson College in Boston, where he tried his hand at acting and writing. He was a charter member of Emerson's Comedy Workshop, and taught at the college for five years after graduating. By that point he had written several pieces for magazines and had worked at stand-up comedy for a time. In 1990 he and his wife Ann flew to London to perform in the BBC's Paramount City. That weekend Ann's water broke. Their planned weekend trip became a stay of months, and Denis, with not a whole lot to do in London, wrote a one-man comedy act. He brought friends in from the States, and they wrote songs to perform on stage.

"We didn't have MTV, we had the fucking supermarket!"

Hey, who remembers OPERATION DUMBO DROP? I'd say Dr. L has come a long way.

Marked for Death...by music!

Or: Under Siege...by dreadful noise! (Sorry I'm not trying hard here, the picture needs no caption)



Thanks Montone.