The Gift of Absence

The day before Mother's Day, I thought I'd do something nice for the lady in my life. I didn't have a clue what to do until her and my daughter told me the zoo was having a mother's day promotional thing where you buy a tee for $7 and get in free. So I packed up the kids and took them without Mandi. That doesn't sound like a good present, but it is.

I picked up my mom on the way. She's always up for some fun. And telling me how to drive. I almost kicked her out of the car.


The first thing we did was get our faces painted. The kids all got their favorite animal, but I asked the girl to make it look like
wolverine had scratched me with his adamantium claws. And I said to do a teardrop, because it hurts to get clawed. She did pretty well, but the hat goes off to Oliver's painter. She had to endure him talking about Donkey Kong the entire time. The thing with my kid, Oliver is that, yeah, he's cute, but get him started, and he will talk until you are forced to put him down iwith a shotgun.

Then we went and stood in line for the train. The dude ahead of me had his face painted like Wolverine, so we started chatting about the movie, and how his wife (who was painted like a flamingo) needs to see it. Yeah, the reviewers didn't like it, and most comic book geeks didn't like it, but I thought it was freaking awesome just because
a) Wolverine clawed a crapload of people and
b) Deadpool's head created the Three Mile Island disaster. For some reason, this didn't convince her.


Check out Alex's socks. I'm so proud.

That night I went and saw Star Trek with my pal Jeremy. Spoiler alert: Time travel is awesome. You know how on the TV show, Spock was supposedly captain of a starship for 20 years before he even met Kirk? Well, JJ Abrams had an answer for that: No, he wasn't. You know how on the TV show, the dude that goes on the mission wearing a red shirt always gets his ass killed? That was awesome. In the movie, they changed that to a dark maroon shirt.

Last night I watched some of the Biggest Loser finale (where, like every reality show competition, the most annoying person won) until the finale of Fringe (where the most annoying character gets split in half or turned inside out or injected with alien larvae). Then I went to Blockbuster to get Taken. I had heard it was good from somebody that when I remember the identity of will get a punch in the crotch. It should have been called Taken From Behind by 20th Century Fox. Qui-Gonn is too old for cool-looking karate. It was entertaining to see Shannon from Lost run in a couple scenes (which we kept rewinding) because she runs like tranquilized Frenchman with no arm control. All the dudes in the Lost discussion forums talk about how hot she is, but this is something that probably could not be explained by science. Actresses are supposed to either convincingly play a character or turn me on, not make you flip off the screen until your fingers hurt.

The set of skills he's acquired that he uses in this movie are:
1) having a friend in the CIA that can look up all the information about the kidnappers in the space of 15 minutes after getting 10 seconds of audio over a cell phone.
2) the ability to zoom in and print a hi-res picture of someone taken with a normal cell phone camera.
3) the ability to make a special brew of chemicals that make drugged out prosititutes wake up and feel better.
4) the ability to be shot at multiple times from point blank range with an automatic weapon, yet receive no injury.

Wow, I watch a lot of things. Maybe I ought to take some time to get to know my family again...at least until Terminator comes out.