Today, the little man and I went on our little road trip. A mini-tour of Los Angeles toy stores. First, we took a nice (and very trafficky) drive up to Wacko’s Soap Plant. (Back-note, I’d been thinking of taking little man to Giant Robot all week and Tricia recommended I make time to visit Wacko’s and Munky King. Very good recommendation) I’ve you’ve never been, let me just start by saying, I guarantee the only place a store like this even could exist, is in LA. It’s sooo Los Angeles. All kinds of people shopping while we were there; a family with their 2 1/2 year old, college kids checking out the art gallery, tattooed crew, and even the local punk rock kid in yes, you guessed it, leopard print vest and black bondage pants. Rockin. Like I said, only in LA.

The place is wonderful. I must say, I’m glad I’ve ditched (most of) my habit of buying really spur-of-the-moment type funky weird stuff. If not, Dawn would not be happy with me right now. So many random fun weird toys in there. I was lovin it. And so was the little man; though admittedly, I was nervous he’d wreck at least one of the 37 million toys they had everywhere. But, he did well.

This was little man’s favorite thing in the art gallery:

We walked out of there with a couple of tin alligators, Lemonheads candy for me, and, the coolest thing ever; a black washcloth, with the pirate skull and cross bones on it. Nice.

Next, we were off to Munky King. On the way there I just had to take a picture of some amazing, and HUGE advertising:

Munky King on Melrose is really great. Of course the first thing we get there, Ian spots the girl who works there rearranging some of the display and has to go flirt. (that’s my boy!!!) She played skateboards (little hand ones, not full size) and yes, Daddy is a sucker and bought him a vinyl figure that comes with a skateboard. We’ll share though – I get the figure for my desk at work – he gets the skateboard. He ran around the store and made me nervous so we didn’t stay too long, but he did enjoy the custom larger than life vinyl in the back that all the locals had signed, and added to. Very cool:

Also, as we were paying for his toys I noticed some very nice art they had by ‘Plastic God’. I know you’ll recognize the subjects:

At that time, it was starting to get a bit late. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to make it to Giant Robot, but guarantee we’ll be up there very soon. We had to hurry home meet Dawn for the Modefan meetup, which was of course a blast!!!

Ok, hello, and welcome the new edition of Thursday night exhaustion. Typically, by the time Thursday evening hits, I’m frigin pooped out. This week is no different. Though the point I currently find quite interesting is this, why do Fridays keep creeping up on me? For at least 3 weeks now, it’s been Friday before I realized it.

A couple weeks ago we had a short week for the 4th. I can understand that feeling like a short week, but it’s continued that feeling since then. And, each and every Thursday night I’m tired, exhausted, brain dead. (Yet I still sit here don’t I – instead of doing the intelligent thing by going to sleep) Tomorrow I’ll likely be a zombie. Looking forward to it though, Moody and I are going to take the boys out so the mommas can have a night of fun. Not positive where we’ll go, but I’m sure we’ll have a good time. I can say this though; with the craptastic weather we’ve been having, the evenings plans will likely include ice cream. haha.

So the blog is working for me well so far. Not positive how interesting it is for you, but we’ll have to see.

So I completed my purchase of the ‘River Run Project’ that Underworld has been selling directly through their website, http://www.underworldlive.com. If you have not picked all of them up, seriously, what are you waiting for. Now having purchased all three (went back and bought Pizza for Eggs tonight) I was allowed to download ‘The Misterons Mix’. Those of you who know me – know I adore Underworld.

this picture came with the mix, and I hope it does not bother them that I share it (like I could be so lucky that Smith/Hyde would read my blog), but it’s just got an amazingly eerie quality to it. Had to put it up here.

(I will of course remove the image if asked though)

something about it, just a captivating moment I guess.

What a busy weekend.

First, Friday night Ethan and I went to (finally) see A Scanner Darkly. What a(n expected) mind bender. Truly wanted to read it prior to seeing the movie, but hey, who has the time??? When I first saw the preview it looked more like the movie faded in and out of the ‘Rotoscope‘ effect, but <<possible spoiler>> it does not. It stays in the heavily animated look for the entire movie. But ya know, it really works for the content of the movie. And yes, Winona is still beautiful animated.

Robert Downey Jr. is freakin amazing in this film. I was thinking afterward, and I ran the question by Ethan as well; I wonder, given the subject matter, if this movie was hard for him to make, or it was cleansing in a way. We both agreed in the hopes that it was cleansing. Keanu was really good as well, he fit the character quite well. People give him a hard time, but ya know, (with the exception of his performance in Dracula) I find myself really enjoying the work of his I see. There were a few trailers for small release films I definitely need to see. One was about this little asian kid growing up in a motel. To me it looked like a cross between Lost in Translation and Napoleon Dynamite, if that makes any sense. I’ll have to ask Ethan if he remembers this name of the film. The line that cracked me up was this; <setting: the older ‘role model’ guy is talking to the kid in the movie> “You know, the First Noble Truth of Buddhism is: Life sucks!!” HAHAHAA I was rolling!

Then there was Saturday… COMIC-CON!!!! Always a blast. Even got to see a bit of rough footage from Spider-Man 3 with Mr. Sam Raimi himself! That was frigin AWESOME. One of my other favorite parts of the day was seeing ILM’s Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll give a talk about the graphic effects done for Pirates2. (All from the comfort of his lovely mac of course) Though Dawn rolled her eyes at my enjoyment in ILM’s naming of their special motion capture technique developed for this film, I loved it. iMocap!!! Dood, what’s not to love!!!

After all’s said and done, one preview I just can’t get out of my mind is for this movie I hadn’t even heard of until the showed the trailer. Renaissance. It’s done in this very extreme black and white, which I can see will be a problem for some people, but, to me it’s very unique. I’ll be looking forward to that.

Today all in all was a great day too. I got to spend a lot of time with my little man, he even gave Venerable Miao Hsi a big hug when he saw her. So wonderful.

So I made a promise to myself today when I was driving to work. I promised I would get through my massive inbox. Time escapes you when you have a lot of things going on, and ya know, the email continues to pile in.

I did end up making a ton of progress. It was really good.

So I was doing my (almost) daily read of Wired.com and found an article by Momus that really hit home.

The Curse of Storage. So many points he makes are amazingly relevant in my life as well. All my life I’ve been such a pack rat that I have these massive accumulations of junk. It’s really hard to get through these when you’ve been this way for so many years. Though I must disagree on one thing, at least for my life. If I truly need to put it in long term storage – get rid of it. I could see if you lived in many places throughout the world over the years like he does, but, for me – staying quite close to the same area (yes, I know, how boring) it just makes no sense to keep long term storage.

Tonight I also bought Delicious Library in hopes to catalog my music, movie, and book collections. I think this will be a step in the right direction. Plus, Delicious Monster was having their ‘Delicious Gambler’s Sale’ so how could I pass up such a deal!! Quite impressive software, but hey, we are taking about software that runs on a mac aren’t we?!?!?!

So tonight, we’re sitting there eating dinner and I had to laugh. Remember the movie, ‘A Christmas Story’? Well, more specifically, the part where the Mom is getting Ralph’s little brother to eat and she asks him ‘How does the little piggy eat’. I found it hilarious that to get little man to eat tonight, we asked him to remember how Bruce (Pixar’s Finding Nemo) ate.

So Dawn and I actually had a night to ourselves. We took the little man over to a friends house so he could play for a while. Wow was that nice. It was only a few hours, but it was nice nonetheless.

Went and saw Pirates 2 finally. I did really enjoy it. And the theater was packed still. I must admit, possibly my favorite part was the fact that Davey Jones has a VERY Cthulhu influenced look to him. Can’t beat a Lovecraft reference. Tomorrow we may head down to the beach and I do need to brave a trip into that garage of ours to begin cleaning it out.

So far I’m liking this ecto software. May need to make a purchase.