Another Pic-a-Day Update

Here are the photos I had trouble uploading the other day, and a couple more to get me up to date through yesterday.

Click on the pics to see a bigger version.

Jan 14th:I nearly forgot to take a picture on the 14th, and had to do this just before midnight as I was preparing the garbage to be taken to the curb. Guinness' old food bags make very good heavy-duty garbage bags when I have something heavy or sharp to toss out.

Jan 15th:
Of course I didn't expect to see this a couple hours later when I walked out to my car. It was cold when I went to bed, but it hadn't started snowing. This pic is a little blurry as it was really dark out and I took it without flash. I had the shutter open quite a while, and was shivering as I was holding it.

Jan 16th:
VEGAS!

My reservation at MGM for April. I am soooo looking forward to this already, even though it's over 3 months away. BTW, that's not my real confirmation number in case anyone has any ideas about changing my reservation.

Jan 17th:
My cousin Denise and her devil dogs. I took Guinness with me when I went over to her house that night to eat dinner. He was shocked to see them get up on the couch and looked like he was waiting for me to yell at them the same way he'd get yelled at if he tried that at home.

Jan 18th:
With the high temp at about 20 degrees, I doubt seeing this happening at a house in my neighborhood could have been very good.

MMR #2, Alien

Movie number 51 on the IMDB top 250 when I started this project was Alien. I had seen this movie when I was younger, but didn't remember that much about it. There is a good reason for that....there wasn't too much to this movie.

The plot is very simple. 7 crew members on a cargo ship bound for Earth carrying a bunch of intergalactic ore are awaken from their "cryo-sleep" early when the ship's computer receives a transmission from another ship nearby.

They go to a planet which seems uninhabitable where 3 crew members stumble onto a
crash site and find a bunch of pods or eggs or something. One of those pops open and the entity inside affixes itself to the face of a crew member. They take him back to the ship where the ship's 3rd in command, Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) refuses to let them past the airlock without being quarantined for 24 hours, in an effort to protect the others on the ship. The science officer takes it upon himself to override the airlock door and let them in.

After a little while the alien on the face of the crew member shrivels up and dies, and the crew member wakes up. Before going back to their cryo-beds for the rest of the trip home, the crew decides to have dinner together. This is where the infamous scene of the alien busting out of the guy's stomach takes place. After that a whole lot of cat and mouse takes place trying to find and kill the alien.

When the crew has only four of the seven still alive, everyone finds out that the science officer isn't really alive after all. He's a robot that was ordered to get the alien back to Earth alive at all costs, even if it meant the entire crew had to die. The three remaining crew members "kill" the robot and decide it's time to get in the shuttle and blow up the ship with the Alien still on it.

Only Ripley makes it to the shuttle alive before the ship blows up, and after a gratuitous underwear scene she realizes she's not alone on the ship. Somehow the alien snuck onto the shuttle while her dumb ass was chasing a cat around the mothership.

Of course she outsmarts the alien and ejects him from the shuttle, sends a message out to any ship in the area that could rescue her, and gets into her cryosleep chamber.

Overall this was a pretty good movie, but seeing as it was made in 1979 the special effects are very dated. I certainly wouldn't put this movie in the top 52, but considering I am too young to remember how other movies were in 1979, maybe it's deserving. Overall I would rate Alien a 7 out of 10.

Tonight I'll be watching A Clockwork Orange, which I've never seen and am excited to check out. The review should be up in the next couple days.

Pic-a-Day Project Update and MMR #2

Amazing how I say I need to update more often, then I actually take longer to post my next update than I had before, isn't it? I will truly make an effort to upload pics more often, and should have the next one up by Sunday at the latest.

This time around I am going to use Blogger to upload my pics instead of photobucket. If there are any problems, let me know. Click on the photo to see the actual size.

Jan 10th:
A boring Thursday night looking ahead to a busy Friday at work. Lots of important people to impress, gotta keep those shirts nice and white.

Jan 11th:
This is not my dog. For a while there I thought about adopting it, but just couldn't justify it with my schedule since she is only (approximately) four months old. I found her running alongside the entrance ramp to I-94 when I was driving home from work. A few minutes earlier, I never would have seen her. A few minutes later, she probably would have ended up as road kill. She came right to me when I stopped to get her. Let me pick her up and put her in my truck with no issue whatsoever. She even laid down on the ride to my house, which I still can't get Guinness to do in the car. Brought her in the house when I came in to get my phone which I had forgotten when I went into work that morning, and she was well behaved. She met Guinness and they got along so well that he was disappointed when I took her to the shelter, and seemed even moreso when I came back without her. I haven't seen him act that way since Kira was still his partner in crime.

It is hard for me to believe it's just coincidence. Which made it so much harder today when I told the people at the shelter I couldn't adopt her. I hope they find her a really good home, because this is probably going to bother me for a while....

Jan 12th:
During the Patriots/Jaguars game Pam begins to speculate on the size of Tim Brady's....well, you get the idea.

Jan 13th:MEAT!

My bowl of delicious pork products, with a little pasta in there, at Mongolian. Notice the size difference between my portion and Sarah's portion there on the left. Even with the rice she couldn't come close to the amount of calories I was about to ingest.

Even the best laid plans don't always work out, so I guess I shouldn't be so disappointed that blogger isn't letting me upload pictures right now....after I changed my layout (yet again) to conform with the blogger pics instead of the photobucket pics.

I'll try and load the rest of the pics and put up MMR#2 after dinner.

Pic-a-Day Update

I really need to update this more frequently, as I have almost an entire week's worth of pictures to post now. Now that I have gotten in the habit of taking my camera with me just about everywhere, the pics will be the easy part of this silly project and the hard part will be juggling when to post picture updates, movie review updates, and regular blog posts.

On to the pictures!

Jan 4th:
With a sink full of dishes, what are two single guys to do when dinner time comes? Pizza is always good at times like this because it comes with it's own container that you can eat right out of....

Jan 5th:
This picture was originally supposed to be the ravioli I was cooking right before Mark, Sarah, and I headed out to the east side for Justin's party....BUT something happened just I was about to serve myself dinner, and now we have this. Story is; I had just finished pouring my sauce onto my pasta when the bread I was microwaving in this container was done heating up. I turned off the burner, placed the sauce pot into the sink, and the styrofoam container with the bread in it on the burner which I guess was still hot. I left the kitchen to wash my hands because it's now time to eat, and when I come back about 2 minutes later....there's a fire on top of my stove. Again. Fret not, the fire cause no more damage than what you see here. And most importantly, the bread was not harmed in the fire.

Jan 6th:
Less than a week ago there was about a foot or so of snow on the ground around here. Sunday began the unseasonable warm-up, and this fog was the result of the quick snow melt. This pic was taken at Rotary Park in Livonia just after I left Marc's house following our day at the Motorcycle Expo in Novi and lunch at Mongo.

Jan 7th:
For the 7th I had many options for pics, and was pretty sure I would post the pic of my bike seeing as it's not very often that you get to ride a motorcycle in Detroit in the first week of the year. Thinking about it though, I am sure to have a bunch of motorcycle related pics throughout Spring and Summer, so this picture made a little more sense. This is a wall at Logan's Road house where I went to dinner with my mom, aunt, cousin, and cousin's husband.

Jan 8th:
I didn't get much accomplished on the 8th, so this pic is a little bit of a cheat. I didn't take this picture. I took a picture OF this picture, but it didn't turn out well....so I decided to use the original. This pic was on a blog I found when I signed in to leave Sarah a comment on her blog. On the blogger dashboard I noticed that one of the recently updated blogs was titled "Max's Blog". I had to check it out. This was the last picture of the last post from his blog, and I found the irony of it all quite amusing.

Jan 9th:
In an effort to save money and lose weight, I am eating more often at home. This lovely bowl of cottage cheese was my whole dinner tonight.

MMR #1

Max's Movie Review #1:
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
#52 on the IMDB Top 250.

This was an interesting film to start my movie reviews with. I have never seen it, or any other Humphrey Bogart film, and had no idea what to expect.

The movie starts off simple enough; a down on his luck American (Fred C. Dobbs, played by Bogart) stuck begging for money from fellow Americans in a small town in Mexico. I'm sure the name of the town was mentioned in the movie, but I honestly never did catch it.

The plot really starts to form a few minutes in when Dobbs asks the same man for money for the third time in one day with his vintage line of "would you stake a fellow American in a meal?". The man does in fact give him money again, this time twice the amount he had the two previous times, but rips into him a little for having the audacity to ask him so often in one day.

Soon thereafter, Dobbs finds another American in the city who is offering up jobs with good pay. For a couple weeks he works on this job with his new found friend Curtain (played by some dude who looks a whole lot like someone I can't think of) until they ferry back to town and the their boss on the job tells them to meet him at the pub in an hour to get their pay, and gives them 10 pesos as down payment. Dude doesn't show, they use the down payment to get drunk, then get a couple of cots at a local flophouse.

Here's where the story starts to really form. In the flophouse they meet Howard, an old timer that claims to have struck it rich before panning for gold. Soon thereafter Curtain and Dobbs finally get their money, and they are off to the mountains in search of their fortune.


There are a few twists and turns along the way, and if you haven't seen this movie yet I would suggest you check it out. The second half of the movie had two genuine laugh out loud moments for me. The first involves banditos. I had no idea one of the lines I would hear from a random bandito would be something very famous. The other involves a blooper with the camera panning too far to the left in one scene and revealing part of the set that shouldn't have made it on camera.

Overall I think I'd rate this movie at 7.5 on a ten point scale. If you are into old movies, this could jump by as much as a point and a half, and if you are someone who seems allergic to black and white on a TV, it would probably drop by a point and a half.

In a couple days I'll review the #51 movie and hopefully have a better review up here a couple days later.

New and Improved for 2008!

That's just about how I come into every new year. I don't have too many resolutions per se, but each year I want to do a lot of things in my day-to-day life a lot better. Of course this year is no exception, but this time around I have outlined a couple different projects to tackle on a regular basis.

The first project I came up with was a picture-a-day. I need to take one picture each day illustrating something I did that day, somewhere I was, topic of conversation, etc. This was meant to get me to take my camera out with me more often so I can get some really good pictures when the situation arises. I thought of it a couple weeks ago when most of Detroit was blanketed in fog, and from my window at work high above the fog I was forced to take some pictures with my camera phone instead of getting some really sweet ass pictures if I would have brought my camera with me that day.

Later in the week I came up with another idea, out of sheer boredom at work. I was looking up some info on The Matrix at imdb when I noticed it was in the IMDB Top 250. I looked over the top 25 and top 50 movies and realized that, for someone who claims to love movies, I really haven't seen enough of the best movies of all time. So my second project will be to watch one movie per week, starting with movie #52 and working my way to #1, and give a short review of it here.

Pic-a-Day:

Since we are only 4 days into 2008, I don't have much to put here....but it's a start.

Jan 1st:


This is the monkey I velcroed to Marc's belt as he tried to sleep well after midnight on NYE. Last New Year's, a few of us took much joy in constantly deflating the big man's air mattress as he slept in the living room at The Ranch. This time around he had a room to sleep in, but no closed door could keep me from deflating his hopes of a good night's sleep. The monkey was an innocent bystander until I saw him hanging from the closet door.

Jan 2nd:


The first of my movies, "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre". A review shall appear here sooner rather than later.

Jan 3rd:
Here we have just about every plate and utensil I own, along with a few pots and pans, and even a few more glasses. With my roommate and I both making a dish to take to The Ranch on NYE, the sink got full rather quickly. Unfortunately for my roommate, the dishes are his household chore. Unfortunately for me, there are no clean utensils in the house now as he still hasn't gotten around to this chore. This became my picture of the day because I tried to eat something with a fork last night and stumbled upon this as I looked for a clean one.

That's all for now since my Jan 4th pic is still pending, but check back soon as I am sure I will get one or two amusing pictures in here before long.