Tap Water

My new exercise watch today was a documentary on the bottled water industry called Tapped. While I have been known to choose bottled water over certain other beverage options, I have frequently been mocked and maligned by friends, acquaintances and strangers for being a tap water drinker first.

Watch this documentary and see who the real imbecile is. I actually have known for many years that nearly half of all bottled water in this country comes from municipal water systems. In other words, Coke and Pepsi run tap water through a glorified Brita filter and call it pure.

They even do it when the surrounding communities are experiencing droughts. Gotta love that. Take a walk through those lovely richmond doors in greater Raleigh or suburban Atlanta and you’ll fall in love with the dusty, scorched earth, while nasty old city folk are sucking down your life giving H20 at their overpriced health clubs.

PURE?!? Purified is not pure. If I bleach my toilet, it may be purified of germs, but I wouldn’t refer to it as a pure source of anything. Then again, I have an excellent well, so it might just be that my toilet water trumps Dasani and Aquafina in the race.

Somehow we’ve taken the most important building block of life and ruined it. We’ve made pure something artificial. It’s purificial.

I should trademark that. It’ll be the brand for my toilet water. I’ll put a mountain on the label. It’ll be so sweet.

Storage Issues

Yes, I do have storage issues. In my time I have been a bit of a media junkie, accumulating hundreds (probably thousands) of CDs, tapes, records, and DVDs. I dealt with my VHS situation a few years ago and now I’m getting ready to deal with my audio cassettes. But my real killer right now is DVDs. My music collection has stabilized quite a bit, so expansion is not much of an ongoing problem. I believe I have adequate, uh, padding.

Movies, though. They keep coming out. And though Netflix and online services have curtailed a good bit of the buying, there are still selections I like to physically own. So lordie, lordie, my kingdom for a really kickass DVD rack. ‘Nuff said?

AD: The return

Can I just say that now that the new season of Arrested Development is in production, and said production is officially confirmed, I am just THRILLED. Aren’t you.

Man, I really do love that show.

Popcorn and Tears

I took the boys to a movie a couple days ago. It was an afternoon showing at the $3 a show theater that has stuff no longer available in most theaters, but not quite yet out on DVD. It’s an old school dive theater from the 70s, and I love it. The projection is a little too dark, the seats are threadbare and squeaky. I feel 13 years old again. And there are rarely more than 12 people at a showing.

Anyway, right before the movie started, a mother with trailer hips and three kids came in. She had a little girl who screamed and cried for nearly the entire 104 minutes. Periodically, the yelling was about the fact that Momma was on the cell phone, and the movie told her Momma wasn’t supposed to be on the cell phone.

Momma’s response?

“Quiet down, people are trying to watch the movie.”

Backseat Litigation

I just saw the Lincoln Lawyer, and while I’m no big McConaughey fan, I actually kind of like him in the role. In fact, I really enjoyed the film. I am a huge fan of Michael Connelly – love his novels, especially the Harry Bosch books. I have enjoyed the Mickey Haller books, although I have often felt them slightly forced when compared to his other books.

I think what actually sold me on the authenticity (as such, it being an over the top thriller with a bit of courtroom drama in the mix) in the film was the soundtrack. The hip hop emphasis while the lawyer is cruising around is perhaps better explained in the novel, but for me, seeing the film, it really fit with the super saturated color process and the shaky camera work. Definitely worth the time.

Hillbillies

I hate to go back to the Whites, but that documentary really did irritate me. I feel like I should have a term insurance without medical exam joke here, especially with all of the time they spend in the Emergency Room, but of course, they don’t even think about stuff like that.

And there I go again, being an elitist. I know. such an awful character I am. Dangblast it.

Worthy Subjects

Okay, so if the Whites are unworthy of documentary coverage by my reckoning, who should we be looking at? Turn to the work of Errol Morris. Vernon, Florida is a favorite. In this and other documentaries, he certainly outs some bizarre folks with beyond interesting outlooks and/or demeanor. But while we can marvel and even chuckle at their eccentricities, we are not celebrating their anti-social and downright criminal behavior. We are, instead, enjoying their quirks and coming away with a sympathetic understanding of their eccentricities.

No, I’m not advocating pointing fingers at people who are a little different and laughing at them. But by the same token, I have no intention of elevating the awful behavior of outlaws and human pharmaceutical fementers in a pathetic and self-indulgent pretense of folk hero worship. Seriously.

Whites

One documentary that drove me crazy was the one about the White family in West Virginia. They are basically a family of hoodlums, criminals and junkies that terrorize their county with nonsense. While the documentary (whose producers included Johnny Knoxville of Jackass fame) occasionally tries to humanize these awful people, it is far more interested in catching them in ironic contradictions.

Like the new mother who just snorted a crushed Oxycontin pill off the nightstand in the hospital room while her newborn sleeps 10 feet away. In the next scene she is chain-smoking, being driven home after her baby was taken away by child services, crying about someone “strange” holding her child.

Yeah, we get the joke. The filmmakers are laughing at the hillbillies who are too stupid to realize they’re being mocked. It almost makes them seem more sympathetic. And that is just one of the film’s failures.

In the proud redneck wilderness inhabited by these freaks, a dna paternity test is beyond necessary each time one of these delightful ladies gets pregnant, half the time to figure out which distant cousin is responsible.

Right, I know I sound like some Northeastern elitist, but I feel a little entitled. If filmmakers are going to glorify the horrible actions of brutish slobs and continue to foster a culture of personality and false reality, I think I should get on the proverbial high horse and complain.

Documentaries

With all the exercising I’ve been doing lately, I have plenty of time to browse the Netflix queue. I’ve been on a bit of a documentary kick lately and I’ve seen some good ones. Thing is, documentaries nowadays sometimes remind me of the big coffee table books that collect a particular artists paintings on a theme. If you check the slipcover carefully you discover that such books are often the byproduct of some Fine Arts graduate thesis.

I feel like documentaries are the new coffee table book medium. Some do a fantastic job of making their point and driving their idea while still offering some insight into the full story… so they at least SEEM unbiased. Sure, there’s an agenda, but do they go for full disclosure? If so, I’m alright with it.

I watched a Walmart documentary recently, and while it was fairly interesting and I found myself in agreement with most of the sentiment conveyed by the filmmakers, I felt it lacked some interesting detail. Since it purported to be a far reaching and all encompassing portrait of the corporate behemoth, there were some early innovations and even potential cultural contributions made my the consumer goods giant that were never mentioned. Like aggressive fleet tracking, careful inventory management and early adoption of many technologies, some of which would eventually revolutionize retail.

Sure, you can ask for better or worse? You can wonder how I would be coming out as a defender of Walmart. But there is a reality to the “other side” that was ignored. Ultimately this reduces the effectiveness of the presentation.

 

Seriously?

A while back I helped a dude out with a website. He had nothing and wanted a simple presence for his start up business. At the risk of sounding like a king jerk, it is a pretty unestablished gig, facing major hurdles. I wish him the best, with all my heart. No one loves the little guy more than me, but when I offered to help set something up (because that is, after all, what I’ve been doing for 15 years or so) it turned into major problems.

First of all, I was doing this gratis – you’ll recall my love of the little guy statement a moment ago. Nevertheless, this became a major exercise in designing for the customer of discriminating taste. In other words, designing to the subjective tastes of this particular dude.

This is, of course, fine for me. I have a thick skin when it comes to designing for clients. I learned long ago that only their opinion matters in the long run. If I sell them on something I believe is superior, they must then sell everyone else. But if they honestly believe something is great (regardless of how awful and compromised it really is) they will proselytize to their dying day. So… go with it.

But this guy, who was doing nothing, and only got off his bum because I pushed him and did hours and hours of free work suddenly turned into the taskmaster from hell. All the sudden he’s an expert in SEO and is calling for a webhostinghub review and why can’t we have some Flash?

Are you kidding me? This is a guy so technically challenged that I can actually bitch about him on this blog with no fear that he’ll ever come across it. Sheesh.