I saw One Hour Photo this weekend. It was probably one of the best movies I’ve seen in several months. The acting, directing, cinematography were all top notch. The story was so good, that I shook my head in disbelief that this came from Hollywood. Read below, there are no spoilers here.
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Hey, been a busy weekend. Now, I’m recovering from something I ate today that simple didn’t agree with me.

My mentor has received my funds and I’m all set to go for my mentoring program. Should be fun, a lot of the other people I’ve heard from have had good success with my mentor’s program. In a lot of ways, it seems like I’ve bought into a franchise. Cool. Wasn’t as expensive as Mc. D’s. We’ll see if I can have 1 billion served in a while.

Dylan, Bridget and I stayed up real late Friday night and beat the hell out of Hunter: The Reckoning. Then, I had crazy dreams about a giant werewolf. That was a direct result of the game. Stupid werewolves. Click on the more below if you’d like to read my review of the game.
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At about 6:00, Carlos, an old friend, IM’d me and told me he was in town. I went to the Sheraton to meet him. I got there at about 11:00 since he was working late. Right before I got there, he called me to ask how far I was away. I told him I was almost there. He said, “The scene at the bar is really interesting tonight.” I asked what he meant, but he only chuckled to himself and said, “Just get here”.

I parked in the garage a few minutes later and I walked in. I went into the lobby and hoped to see some loose stewardesses or fetching flight attendants. I saw a few entering the hotel as I drove in. I look around for Carlos, but out of the corner of my eye, I see that the bar is packed. I look again and I see some really ugly women. That’s not uncommon I thought for that fraction of a second dedicated to sexual thoughts. I looked around and saw even more ugly women, I didn’t know what to think of this. I was like, “Damn there are some ugly women here tonight.” Then I notice these are not ugly women, they are men dressed as ugly women! I noticed one brown-haired guy with an unbuttoned blouse flashing a bra. Woah. Maybe I stepped into the Twilight Zone. I look around for Carlos to see if one of these wenches might have taken him in their hairy grasp. Fortunately I hear the unfettered call of my friend. He’s looking fit and he’s lost some weight.

We head to the bar and order a couple Grey Goose and tonics. We are in the thick of this. Then we overhear that one of the women is Lola, the famous Lola. I don’t know what to make of it. I am smiling like a fool, trying to keep from laughing so hard. It’s like that old beer commercial where the male fans dress as women to drink on ladies’ night. These transvestites are dressed really bad. From what I’ve seen on Jerry Springer, I thought they tried to look like women. These women apparently aren’t watching the same shows.

Carlos and I sit down to catch up on old times. Carlos tells me that the Lola chick in none other than the Lola from this HBO documentary. Crazy, I’m a few feet from a transgender star. Turns out thse shemales are in town for Southern Comfort, a transgender convention held in Atlanta. We talked about what we would wear if we went transvestite. Carlos said he’d go slutty, hotpants and all. I can appreciate that. I told him I’d dress like Mimi from the Drew Carey Show. Most of the transvestite people there seemed to dress slutty. Although some looked pretty repsectable, they didn’t try to hide their maleness much. Scary night, bad dreams for me for sure.
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Today was a day of losses. A day of mourning. My little toe nail finally fell off. It was the first casualty of my body from my Grand Canyon adventure. I’ll post my story about that ordeal as soon as I write it all down. I’m saving the nail, I might put it in my medicine cabinet ala The Fly. Any guesses as to what else might come off? I have a big toe that is smelling bad.

I upgraded my computer today. I installed a few new drivers for my video card, my Via chipset, and then threw in a GeForce 3 I’ve had laying around. I was trying to play Unreal Tournament 2003, but failed miserably. The demo is still too buggy on my machine. I managed to only get fragged by a bot before it crashed again. At least the Wolfenstein’s demo was better done. That’s an awesome game. I noticed that my new video card is a lot smoother than my GeForcePro 2. I’ll see if my friend Charlie wants to buy this card from me. Or I’ll eBay it. I need to up my feedback.

Well, after I installed the card, my computer didn’t start up. That was scary. I reseated the card and it worked. Then I wanted to move a power plug around. I did that during a reboot and it wouldn’t start up. I unplugged my hard drive’s power, removed the CMOS battery, and then it started to bring up the BIOS screen. I was so happy because I had spent 5 minutes trying to get even that. Then I did something really stupid, I tried to plug in my hard drive’s power while the computer was on. I saw a spark jump and shorted my computer. It shut down and then I was really pissed at myself. I was thinking about how I would figure out which component had failed. Then I was even more pissed at myself. Then I thought how much it would cost to replace the power supply, motherboard, cpu, or RAM. Then I thought about all the data I could have lost on my harddrive. Now I was super pissed at myself. Why didn’t I shut down my computer and then plug it in!!!

I relaxed and tried to go through everything to fix it again. I unplugged my CMOS battery, reset the BIOS and it started up again. There was a tense period where I waited from my hard drive to spin up and then to see the Windows screen come up again. Everything looks good so far. Hope it stays that way. Phew. That was the near loss of the day.

The other losers for the day are the Washington Redskins. Be sure you see Steve Spurrier’s masterful PPBBBBTTTTT on SportsCenter tomorrow. It was pretty funny to see. Right now he’s losing 30-7, Wufferel just threw an interception, and he’s wondering why he ever left Florida. He was a god there. I’m sure things will start to pick up for them.

Today, Yara and I went to a nice tool & gadget party for our friends Christy and Mitch. They are both great people and we are happy for them. We gave them a Henckels kitchen scissor set. This whole idea of new wedding showers was kind of a funny topic.

Yara and Minal wanted to have chocolate party where all the guests brought chocolate of course. Matt also wanted this, but also brilliantly came up with a guns & knives party. I wanted an exotic car party. It didn’t hurt that I saw an Acura NSX for sale today. What would be the ideal male party? I think some government money should be used to explore this. The societal consequences could be breathtaking.

Mitch did do all right in the gadget side of things. He snagged a compound miter saw and drill set. Christy bagged a toaster, scissors, 2 stud finders (I suppose some of the guests didn’t think highly of Mitch! ), roasting pan, and other kitchen like things. I find that hilarious about many of the med school women getting such nice kitchen stuff is that I don’t see them ever using it. Not because they can’t cook, just because these women are so busy.

Mitch and Christy are only having this one shower before the wedding. Some couples have multiple tiers of wedding showers. Ornament parties, Groom’s family wedding shower, Bride’s family wedding shower, regular wedding shower, gadget shower, wedding announcement shower, post wedding shower, what-the-hell-I-think-you-have-more-money shower and so on and so forth. It’s a great haul for the couples and for the stores that have registries. Electronics Boutique needs a registry. Whenever I get married, it’ll be a massive haul too. I might suggest some bath parties. They may take longer than these showers and longer means more expensive gifts.