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Jeff Milner Movie Review – Something’s Gotta Give

At first I thought that “Something’s Gotta Give” would only appeal to a much older audience than myself, but I was pleasantly surprised by this quirky and original comedy. Jack Nicholson plays Harry Langer, an aging, wealthy bachelor whom only dates younger women — much younger woman. He is dating the young and beautiful Marin, played by Amanda Peet, and together they go to her parents beach house for a romantic weekend. Her mother and aunt show up unannounced but after some awkward (and funny) moments they decide they can all spend the weekend at the house together. When Jack’s character suffers a heart attack he is sentenced to a few days alone at the nearby beach house with Marin’s mother Erica as his nurse. Things get interesting as Harry begins to fall in love with the accomplished lady more his age.

The IMDB description:

Harry Langer (Nicholson) is an aged music industry exec with a fondness for younger women like Marin (Peet), his latest trophy girlfriend. Things get a little awkward when Harry suffers a heart attack at the home of Marin’s mother Erica (Keaton). Left in the care of Erica and his doctor (Reeves), a love triangle starts to take shape.

It’s a cute love story that, while a bit on the chick-flick side, I really liked. It’s something that’s definitely worth renting.

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Spring Forward

I missed class today because I didn’t remember to set my clocks an hour forward. That and I slept in. It was a combination of the two, really.

I guess I’m going to be doing homework all day today. Only about a million more projects to do and then I’ll be done for the semester. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel – unfortunately it’s probably just the metaphorical headlights of a train because I still have another year and a half of school to go. Cest la vie.

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I Heart the Ladies

BNL in CalgaryAs promised here is my review from the BNL concert on April 1st in Calgary. It was great! As we were getting seated Anna questioned me about the tickets I purchased, “Do people that sit in these seats really get more nosebleeds?” Very funny. :)

The concert itself was a blast. Jason Plumb and Ron Sexsmith were the two opening acts. They seem like unknowns to me but Anna recognized Ron Sexsmith’s name and apparently Jason Plumb played for the Waltons — which I vaguely recall.

Anyway it was a great concert in which almost every song they played seemed like my favorite. I know I’m a big geek for this Canadian band, but whatever – it was fun. They played:

  • Maybe Katie
  • Too Little Too Late
  • Enid
  • Some Adlibing
  • It’s All Been Done
  • Another Postcard
  • Celebrity
  • More Adlib
  • Never Is Enough
  • I Live With It Every Day
  • Roadrunner
  • For You
  • One Week
  • Upside Down
  • A Bass Solo
  • Alternative Girlfriend
  • Testing 1,2,3
  • Never Do Anything
  • Blame It On Me
  • Shopping
  • Concert Going
  • Pinch Me
  • War On Drugs
  • Beat The Crew
  • Shoe Box
  • Old Apartment
  • Brian Wilson
  • Rio
  • If I Had $1,000,000
  • What A Good Boy

They weren’t planning on playing Alternative Girlfriend but got talked into it when someone in the audience held up a big sign that said quote/unquote Please let my husband drum Alternative Girlfriend with you. So they did. Ed told the audience that if he was at least half decent we should really cheer him on, but that if he sucked then we should beat him to a pulp. He was actually pretty good and it was really fun to watch. It’s stuff like that that makes a concert so memorable.

They had a fun choreographed shopping cart ballet in which they ran around with shopping carts, passed around boxes of cereal and made snow angels on the stage. They did three encore songs, which was more than the last time they were in Calgary, and I must say it was just a perfect concert.

BNL in Calgary

Ed wrote about the concert tour and specifically about Calgary’s show. Ed and Steve are by far my favorite bloggers in BNL – not just because they do the majority of the singing.

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Jeff Unedited

Anna points out that this picture is edited because it’s cropped. It’s true. So maybe it would be better to call this, Jeff Cropped. But it’s up to you. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, I just got my haircut. What do you think?

Jeff Milner Image

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Stairway to Heaven Information

A couple of days ago I received the following email. Those interested in my backmasking page might find this interesting.

Your site really got me interested in looking up information about this and I took a lot of what I already knew and compared it to the things I learned to get a pretty good idea about these backward messages.

Here’s someone else’s lyrics for the whole song…
http://web.stargate.net/zeppelin/
features/sth-reversed/index.html
Interesting how if you read the part where it says
“And all the evil, it was there, they made our souls must have Satan” and you listen to it, I still sounds like this is correct, but if you read your version it does too, I heard ‘sad satan’ before I read your lyrics

I listened to your part of the clip before reading the lyrics and I could hear some key things in it (666,sad satan,oh satan )but the other parts were very tough to interpret. Once someone reads the lyrics and sees them as one thing, it is hard for your mind to view as anything else until you see it a different way.

Link from http://www.popex.com/ — if you go here it explains that it really doesn’t have to be satanic, and probably isn’t. The forward version says “yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run there’s still time to change the road you’re on.” It basically says that this guy believes that he’s saying the path to satin will make you said, he also proposes the idea that satan may be a metaphor for all sadness and suffering.

If you go to http://www.reversespeech.com/Simple_Examples.htm it will give you many examples of things people said that say something else backwards. The guy on this site studies it.
I read partially from this site but mostly from some other site that the subconscious mind can interpret things backwards, and understands it as fact. However conscious decision making skills can override your subconscious mind. I learned before this that your instinct is based on facts you have gather. According to some, the more times you have heard those messages played backward, the more you get in your head to do these thing till it becomes a point where your instinct tells you to do something.

You should also check out Queen’s “another one bites the dust” backwards if you haven’t heard about it already. I won’t tell you what it says backwards, because I think your view may change on what it says but it was pretty clear to me, even before I heard what the lyrics were. However I read from some biased article (with no actual proof) that 80% of people who hear “another one bites the dust” backwards didn’t know what it was until given the lyrics where 100% said they thought that was correct.

Another freaky thing is the pokemon rap where it says “gotta catch em all” backwards says “oh satan, oh satan” sounds freaky, it can be found here, with many other clips of songs that appear to say something backward.

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Crunch Time

I have really let my homework add up. I don’t want this to come off whiney because, number 1 there isn’t really THAT much that I have to do, and number 2 it’s my own fault for not doing these assignments sooner, but for the record this is what I have to do in the next couple days/week. I have 5 abstracts (short one page papers) for New Media Seminar to do, a 10 page Art History paper with a ton of specifications (like 5 sources and a million citations), 2 three page long concert reviews to write, and 2 concerts to attend (so that I have something to review). I wonder if my Music History Prof. would count the BareNaked Ladies concert? After all, the songs from “Gordon” are getting old enough to be classics.

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Two New Elements

Time to replace your old Periodic Table. …a joint American-Russian team has found two new elements-numbers 113 and 115 on the periodic table-hinting at an impending breakthrough in creating novel forms of matter that will test our understanding of atomic behavior.

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The Dead Zone – Kidd of Speed

Chernobyl Home
A little while ago I blogged about the ghost town of Pripyat. There is an interesting article about a woman that drives her motorcycle through the dead zone that I wanted to link to, but her site was down. It’s now back up, updated with pictures from spring of 2004, and it is a tremendously facinating look at the Chernobyl area 18 years later.

In Ukrainian language Chernobyl is a name for a grass, wormwood (absinth) This word scares holly bejesus out of people here. If I tell someone that I am heading in a “dead zone”… you know, what I hear.. In best case- “are you nuts?” My dad used to say that people afraid of a thing which they can not see, can not feel, can not smell and that kills. Dad is nuclear physicist and he also says that of all dangerous things in my life, he can only think about one, which is riding my bike on fifth or sixth gear. In any way, dad and their team work in “dead zone” for last 18 years. They doing researches from the day when nuclear disaster happened. The rest of guys in a team are microbiologists, doctors, botanists.. etc. I was 7 years old back in 1986 and in a few hours after accident happened dad sent us with sister off with the train to Grandmother. Granny lives 800 kms from here and dad wasn’t sure if it was far enough for us to stay away of troubles. Communists kept silence about this accident. In Kiev, they forced people to take part in their stupid labor day parade and then people start learning about accident from foreign radio, from relatives of those who died and real panic began in 7-10 days after accident. Dad says, that in those first 10 days exposure to radiation was the most powerful and can not even be compared with what we have now.

Update (April 30, 2004): The Author is no longer hosting the site. She made this statement:

“‘Ghost Town’ site that was linked to this page ended existance. My purpose to show people Chernobyl is achieved. Site was viewed more then 3 million times within 2 month. I am no longer able to pay for this traffic and I had no other choice as to close this site.

For some it became weapon, for others the subject for speculations. I am out of this.., I just wanted to show people Chernobyl. I did this for free, for no fame and I did this with love for my country. If someone do not like my story, then write a better one and do not try to damp others..

Site was mirrored and copied by many people and it must be somewhere on the internet. Time will show if this is one day popularity or if it has value in itself..

I am no longer able to control or update those sites. A big thanks to people who maintain it after I quit. Also, thanks to Richard Wilson and Leonid Pankratov the authors of some photos. I got permission for using their photos on my site.

I am not involved in any commerce. Anyone who would attempt to profit from this tragedy, and those people who tried to this using my name and my site as tool to make money should be ashamed of themselves.”

Although it should be noted that I found someone has copied her site and is hosting it at: http://www.kiddofspeed.com/. I think it is safe to assume she is not the recipient of any pay pal donations to this site.

Update (May 22, 2004): Apparently the solo motocycle part was a hoax, but everything else was true.

Another Update (December 20, 2005): Her site is back up with some additional photos from new trips through the dead zone. See my post on the Land of the Wolves.