the soupmenu

starship troopers
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there’s campy…and then there’s starship troopers. for some hugely strange reason, i really love this movie. perhaps it gets the best worst movie award in my 4 hour long awards show. to accept the award, the movie would probably set up something to blow up while they were on stage and have bug guts splatter on the guests gallagher style…and i would also like that.

i don’ t know why i like the movie. it’s really just horrible, but there’s some kind of unspoken beauty in it. it’s great seeing the blend of semi-famous actors in a futuristic world where you fight bugs for citizenship…..and everytime you watch it, it gets better.

there is no reason that this movie has to be so bad. it was made in 97 along with other movies that did not include 70’s style campiness. they did have money to make it. it just seems to be a sci-fi flick that they ‘tried to do something different’. i’m not complaining though. how could you not love this movie with lines like………………
‘you kill bugs good’
‘You see a bug hole, YOU NUKE IT.’
‘You’re some sort of big, fat, smart-bug, aren’t you?’

i am really fortunate that someone out there in the television programming world also loves this movie. starship troopers shows up, somehow, on tv about every other month. i catch it…always. i can’t stop watching it once it’s on. i must see the drama between the young kids from the BA(the cool futuristic name of buenos aries), i must see the infomercials for the armyand ‘doing your part’, i must see the troopers stick a nuke into a huge bug with a mouth that looks like….well let’s just say amish wouldn’t approve of it. i think the tagline sums it up “A GUNG-HO SCI-FI EPIC…”my friends hate me now for making them watch it whenever it’s on. my kids are going to hate me in 35 years from now, when i make them watch it until they can recite lines with me.
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everyone has bathroom stories for some reason…here’s mine.

i head to the bathroom at work. right before going into the bathroom i noticed an old, fat man moving in a snail-like fashion to his car. he wasn’t really fat, but he was extremely round. a person that would not lose much speed to friction in a downhill race. So i go to the bathroom and get situated. all of a sudden i heard the door to the bathroom slam open…

cough..hack..hack….cough…uggghhh…guuuh….hack…sniff…hack…snnnuuuuffff.

i have no clue how he did it, but he really managed to make all of the sounds of coughing, hacking, snorting, and wheezing at the same time. i freak out. from the stall window (that crack that is always there so that you can time grand exists) i can see the same guy from outside moving across the room. he of course lands in the stall next to me, continuing to make the same ensemble of flem sounds. i’m concerned…..not for his health, but for my sanity. after a long day’s work i really could not deal with making a statement to the police about all of the sounds that this creature was making while rolling to the bathroom for solice. i put a rush order on my delivery and book it out of the bathroom before something explodes and makes a new hole in the creature.

here’s my statement of the day….all bathrooms should have smooth jazz being played loudly in them. NO ONE really wants to hear any sound that happens in or around a bathroom. If there was a way to mute my hearing I would do it when i’m about 50 ft from a bathroom and wouldn’t turn it on until i’m at a safe distance from the warzone.
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call from grandma…..

gma->”hi…thank you for your bithday wishes…but it didn’t help me find my pants”
me->”you lost your pants?”
gma->”yah, they were here…now i can’t find them anywhere…your dad says they are here, but i think the dragon took them”
me->”i don’t know what a dragon would do with your pants”
gma->”i don’t know either, but if you find them, give me a call, and if i find them i’ll give you a call”
me->”deal”

howl at the moon is open again!!!! Wooohoooo. The old one that was in Orlando closed down a few months before my 21^st birthday so I was never actually able to go. I was able to go to the howl at the moon in New Orleans and had tons of fun with their ability to cuss and make fun of people. I lucked out, and a friend’s roommate actually nabbed some passes for the grand opening of the new howl at the moon. After waiting about 40 minutes to get in, we were finally allowed in when the drinks were no longer free. The bouncers were acting like the place was at capacity, yet once free drinks turned expensive, the bar got surprisingly more packed. The place is huge and is very warehouse-ish. I love any area with huge ceilings. Warehouses, churches, and stadiums all rock. Since they did provide two hours of free drinks, once we sat down we saw many super-drunk old people. In my normal paths in life, I really don’t come across many old drunk people. So when I get to go out and see older people acting like college freshmen…I get a little twinkle in my eye. The night’s apex had to be when they pulled out the keytar and played a super medley that included 50 cent, Journey, and Van Halen. I always think of the dolphin show at the Brookfield zoo when I hear the song jump by Van Halen. I love childhood memories.

I hate rock radio dj’s. They are the most obnoxious, immature, and disgusting people on the earth. For me to call someone immature is a huge thing. I usually try not to hate on people, but the radio dj gene needs to be singled out and destroyed from the pool. There was one at howl at the moon and I wanted to slice his neck with the free cup that his ‘mix 107 cuties’ gave me. The guy was running around the whole bar, doing an obnoxious, I’m going to bump into anyone within 15 feet of me, dance, and screaming with his raspy, old, I’ve yelled woooo longer than you’ve been alive, voice. How can you get so excited to hear ‘come feel the noise’ for the 10 millionth time in your life? Of course when he went up to the stage…he did nothing but scream and yell about how the crowd wasn’t yelling loud enough for his middle-aged, balding, overweight tastes. I’m sorry bud, I just don’t get pumped up when some guy who hasn’t matured since 7^th grade calls me lame because his ears aren’t bleeding from the sound of a screaming crowd. Hopefully satellite and internet radio end these people so they have to get a job where they are required to sit in a room by themselves until they know how to act in public.

UCF tailgating will never be the same. I was talking to one of my friends next to a truck while tailgating yesterday. All of a sudden, a husband and wife carrying a 1 year old child come running at us. They ran next to us and ducked underneath the truck. They tell us that someone has a gun. We duck down and all huddle around the child. Just as we duck down we here three shots. I still didn’t believe it was an actual gun. Since I didn’t grow up in the projects, I didn’t know that gunshots sound like fireworks. (So anytime you hear fireworks and think you might need to run towards the sound to join in the festival of light and sound……don’t) People started running everywhere. The family stayed for another minute to wait for things to calm down, and then took their baby home…they had their fill of UCF Football. After talking to some drunk kids, the story I have is this… A undercover cop tried to stop a fight. He taised a kid…the kids friends immediately jumped the cop, not knowing he was a cop. After being surrounded by drunk kids, he pulled out his badge and gun and shot two shots into the air. A uniformed officer who was near saw the undercover cop shoot in the air so he immediately shot the undercover cop three times in the back.

Cops showed up from everywhere, girls who saw the incident were crying, and a huge chunk of the tailgating area was crime scene taped off. Instantly the scene went from a fun Saturday tailgating in the sun, to a very chaotic area where everyone knew that something big had just happened. It is really a tragic event with many questions that need to be answered such as….why would any cop pull a gun in a crowded area with drunk kids…why would another cop immediately shoot without yelling to check the situation first? It will definitely be interesting to see how many ways everyone will spin this incident and what the long term ramifications of this even will be. One thing is sure, this is the last thing that UCF and Orlando needs right now.

no…i’m actually not going to talk about how horrible my cell phone is and how friends have threatened to send my phone into the gulf so that I purchase one that will actually hold a call for longer than 5 minutes.

i am going to speak about a new phenomia. it’s happened to me a couple of times, and i’m still not really sure what i’m supposed to do. in the middle of one of my breaks at work, i headed to burger king to use their wonderful bathroom facilities. just as I’m walking in, my cell phone rings. bathrooms are really good at two things…..providing a safe haven for tornados, and causing any small sound to echo like crazy. if you drop a pin in the bathroom, it sounds like a 747 is landing. i immediately turned red and booked it out of the bathroom. turns out no one was even in the bathroom, but how am i to not be embarrassed and ashamed of the bellowing cell phone ring for all of the bathroom users to hear? If i had tried to pick it up, the phone probably would have either slipped out of my hands and into the toilet, or it would have slid across the grimmy bathroom floor and directly underneath another stall. Good thing that i wasn’t situated yet, because removing a cell phone from bunched up pants is as easy as getting people to watch arrested development. Maybe i’m wrong on this one. Maybe i should have picked up the phone and had one weird conversation for everyone to hear….

‘yo’
‘hey…what’s up’
‘not much…what you up to’
‘ummm…crappin’
‘oh yah…cool….how long you going to be doing that’
‘ummm….wait…umm………….yah…i’ll be here a while’
’soooooooo……..you at home?’
‘naw….burger king’
‘you pick me up something?’

yet again i miss the days without cell phones….when there were not these extremely awkward situations, and no new areas for manners to arise. life was simple.