God, seriously. It's like she reeeeaally wants to be Oprah and highlight "pressing women's issues," except she lacks the clout or exposure to attract guests who actually have problems. So instead, she has these guests who kinda sorta have a few minor issues and go out of their way to overstate them and make them look like HUGE debilitating difficulties. For example, tonight's episode is about women with body-related self-esteem issues and eating disorders (again). They say one of the guests has an eating disorder because she doesn't eat. But actually she does eat, because she's hardly a skeletal stick figure -- she just eats infrequently. She eats when she's hungry. OMFG CALL OUT THE NUTRITIONIST BECAUSE THIS WOMAN HAS NOT BEEN BRAINWASHED INTO EATING THREE SQUARE MEALS A DAY AT SET TIMES REGARDLESS OF THE STATE OF HER APPETITE! They filmed a segment with her staring at a chunk of salmon while she whined about not wanting to eat it and crap. Um, isn't that why refrigeration and Saran wrap were invented? Toss that shit in the cooling unit and come back in a few hours -- problem solved.

And now they've got this chick on there and are like OMFG SHE IS A 30-SOMETHING MOTHER OF TWO AND YET SHE CAN WEAR CHILDREN'S CLOTHING SIZES. Hello, the woman is fucking 5'1" -- she's just tiny! There would be a problem if she couldn't fit into children's clothes. I can wear children's sizes too, but I don't think that I need to be on Tyra whining about it. And they just brought on the "self-esteem and body image expert," who is clearly overweight. Not that she should necessarily have a problem with that, but if she's supposed to teach these women to gain unnecessary weight to look like her and then be pleased about it, she should lose whatever crackerjack degrees and certification she has and plop her heavy ass down in the driver's seat of a city bus. I wouldn't take any weight-loss advice from Dr. Phil, either.

Conclusion: Tyra Banks should be exterminated.

Hey all! How've you been? Whatcha been up to? I've been playing Freecell. My streak is currently at 168 wins. Fantastic.

I have also been buying toys and DVDs, as usual. Lately I've been on a Transformers kick in terms of toys -- in the past week, I have added four new ones to my collection (bringing my TF count to a grand total of six, or eight if one includes Bootleg Prime and a Go-Bot I have had since I was four years old). I think I will probably stop with them whenever this Megatron is released in a month or so, though. I also picked up a few TMNT figures at Wal-Mart this weekend -- two because they were reduced to $2 each, one because it came with a TMNT PC game. The game is kinda crappy.

I picked up way too many DVDs yesterday -- The Goonies, Team America: World Police, The Last Samurai, Secretary, Meet Joe Black, and Lost in Translation. They were only $5 each, but that's still more than I like to spend during a given outing. Seriously, I am not buying any more DVDs until I have at least put a significant dent in my current queue. Knock on wood.

So, now I will briefly review the movies I have watched thus far this year in an average of five sentences or less. (more...)

Becky is right -- if those DVDs mentioned here had been $4, I probably wouldn't have put them back. (They were actually only $6 -- maybe even $5 -- but oh what a difference a dollar makes!) $4 price tags were enough to get me to pick up Election, Pump Up the Volume, and The Island of Dr. Moreau at Best Buy last week, and I've never even heard of the second and have heard horrible things about the latter. But I like Christian Slater and Moreau is one of those movies that I knew would sooner or later come into my possession simply in virtue of the subject matter, so I figured I wasn't likely to find a better price. Besides, even if it's terrible, the presence of Ron Perlman, Marlon Brando, and Fairuza Balk make it worth a viewing in my book. And Election is just hilarious.

So the other weekend we found this while cleaning the basement. It doesn't work anymore -- it was apparently a promo thing given to my dad by some drug company many years ago -- and there doesn't appear to be any way of replacing the batteries, so it would otherwise have been thrown away... but I have other uses for it. Any guesses as to what I could use it to represent? Read on for a hint... (more...)

Towards the middle of November, I was thinking maybe my online DVD collection count wouldn't make it to 400 after all before the end of 2006, but my initial speculations have proven incorrect -- the arrival of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm today did indeed push the collection into the next level.

And for the record, those of you who think that Batman Begins is the best Batman feature film are totally wrong. Totally.

You know, I wonder if somehow having a comment spam filter attracts spam comments. I mean, WordPress and Akismet appear to do a really good job of catching them, but I never got this many spam messages back on the old Blog of Wes. (There's no sense in reading the old page since I ported all of the old entries over to here, but if you're interested you can take a gander at the old layout :)) Perhaps the programs are lying, in order to exaggerate their performance and effectiveness!

Aaaand on a note somewhat related to that last comment, VOTE TOMORROW! Assuming that you have not already. I'm planning to vote Democratic across the board... and it really sucks that I feel like I have to do that, but I think that's the extent to which the political scene has been polarized as of late. And have you seen some of the Republican National Committee advertisements for this campaign? They're like weird fake campaign ads on a sketch comedy show! Insanity.

Also, given yesterday's international news, I totally want to read this book. Could be interesting!

The Prestige is pretty good stuff, by the way. A lot of the reviews that I've read have called it a challenging and confusing film, but I honestly didn't get any of that -- it seemed fairly easy to understand to me, especially since it goes out of its way to explain the twist ending at the end, replete with flashbacks. Anyway, I wouldn't call it a masterpiece (I probably couldn't rank it among even my top 20 or 30 favorite films, though I'd certainly add it to my DVD collection for $7.50 or less), but it's definitely a great film and makes for a good theater experience. It's certainly the best movie I've seen at the cinema this year! But then, the only other movies I've seen thus far are V for Vendetta and Silent Hill, so that's not saying too much.

Finally, the latest Neurotically Yours cartoon from Ill Will Press -- entitled "Useless Software" -- is quite funny. "It all just says pissed off and a date next to it!" Go watch. 🙂