Coffee

Plenty of you enjoy your daily coffee, right?  Personally, I find that the stuff tastes horrible.  A pretty good rule of thumb for me is that, whenever I need to add a bunch of shit to make something taste better, I probably should just drink something that tastes better in the first place.  I'll take a good whiskey with no Coke in it, a good beer with no lime juice in it, and a good tea with no sugar in it.  That's just me though.  I know how people are creatures of habit and so forth.  If you feel better after a cup of that nasty stuff, then good for you.

So I was driving up to Lapeer yesterday.  I caught a Tennessee run on Monday, then spent my scheduled day off (Tuesday) sleeping and driving home.  In return for my assistance with the Tennessee deal, I got a wicked easy assignment for the next day - one store in Lapeer and another in Imlay City.  Five hours of work for my eight-hour minimum pay, with plenty of time for a nice nap before I hit the gym at night.  Beauty.

The route that I take from Livonia to Lapeer tends to be a hit-or-miss deal.  I run I-96 over to Telegraph (US-24).  Then I go up Telegraph to Square Lake and cut across to I-75.  I-75 dumps me onto Lapeer Road (MI-24) in Auburn Hills.  Lapeer Road goes all the way to Lapeer, which turns out to be convenient when Lapeer is my destination.  The hit-or-miss aspect comes into play when red lights and traffic are taken into consideration.  Sometimes the trip takes an hour.  Sometimes it takes an hour and a half.

On yesterday's trip I caught quite a few red lights.  One of them was in the middle of Lake Orion.  Lake Orion is an interesting town in its own way, since it grew largely around the local GM plant.  Most of the local businesses came in to serve the auto workers and their families.  Then, when many of those same auto workers either lost their jobs or got reassigned to other plants, the city had to adapt.  One of the adaptations - the coffee shop.

I already told you that I have no beef with people who like coffee.  Whatever floats your boat, man.  I do, however, have a beef with a certain class of coffee drinkers.  The people who think that the trendy hipster coffee shop is the center of society - I hate them.  It's not a rational hatred.  These may be fine citizens, after all.  It's just a visceral disgust that I feel when I see some jagoff in his little girly jeans holding a venti latte (or whatever the hell it's called) while he prances down the street admiring the smell of his own farts.  I hate that fucking guy.

Yeah, I saw that guy in Lake Orion yesterday.  He and I were both waiting for the light to change and allow us to proceed to our destinations.  I was driving and he was walking (with his little sissy cup held unnaturally high for the world to see).  I couldn't help but feel sorry for the broad who was walking with him.  Again, nothing rational here.  Just my own impressions.  Seriously though, what is in store for that poor gal?  I don't know man.  I just know that too many people seem to think that the show Friends was real.  It has long been obvious that I was born in the wrong decade, but shit.  There's no way John Wayne would go into some metrosexual coffee shop and pay $8 for a cup of sugary bullshit.  He would boil some fucking coffee beans and suck down the shitty result.  And he wouldn't dress like a member of Culture Club either.

That's enough, I guess.  You get the point.  I actually had a decent topic in mind for one of these posts, but I seem to have forgotten what it was.  A case of beer and a comfy couch will have that kind of effect on a fella.  Maybe that's why the coffee douchebags come to mind tonight.  I don't know.  Whatever.  Back to work tomorrow, so I guess it's bedtime.

Godfather Movie Review: 'Yogi Bear'

In the interest of consistency, I'm going to post this one.  I noted in my previous review that I don't see a lot of movies at the theater and, of the ones I do see, I'm not impressed with many.  But I saw this one, so here we go.

I actually went to the show last week to see Yogi Bear, but I've been relatively busy and haven't devoted a whole lot of attention to this internet business, so I'm just now getting around to catching up on things.  I spent Christmas Eve at my parents' house.  Dinner with the family, gifts for my sister's kids, etc.  Somewhere along the way I was chatting with my little niece.  Since I had Mondays off at the time and she was out of school for the following week, we decided that we would go on a movie date.  When I asked her what movie she wanted to see, she said, "Jack Black."  She was referring, it turns out, to Gulliver's Travels.  The previews looked prettty dumb to me but she's seven years old, so what are you gonna do?

Then I got a call on Sunday as I was heading back to Livonia to drop off my trailer full of empty milk crates.  "Hi Uncle Joe.  My mom told me which movies are playing and I want to see Yogi Bear."  Okay then, Yogi it is.  I picked up my niece on Monday afternoon and we headed to Southgate to check out the flick.  Notwithstanding that there's some sort of pricing scam whenever these 3D movies are involved ($9 for me and $8.50 for her at 2:15pm), I was keeping an open mind.  We got our glasses, grabbed some popcorn, and found our seats.

My review is as follows - dumb.  Quite frankly, I'm not even sure that this movie would be worthwhile for a seven year old.  The 3D aspect was worth no more than a few sight gags.  Nothing in particular comes to mind but you know what I mean.  A character spits out some water and it comes flying at you or whatever.  In general, the movie should have been produced only in 2D.

The story line was a predictable adaptation of basically every movie in the last twenty years.  Some sort of people want to screw the little guy/the environment/minorities/the innocent/etc. and our benevolent heroes are determined to thwart the greedy bastards.  In the case of this movie, the forest is the intended victim.  (I don't think this should serve as any kind of spoiler, given that you already know it's a movie about a bear.)  The hero stumbles several times, as the template would require.  Things look bleak for a moment or two and then the hero recovers to save the day.  I know that it's only supposed to be a kids' movie, but it's paint-by-numbers storytelling at its worst.

Those of us who recall our childhood days will get a laugh or two from the pickanic-basket-thieving hijinks of Yogi and Boo-Boo.  This isn't an essential theme to the plot but it's what Yogi does, after all.  One 'smarter than the average bear' idea ends up helping to defeat the bad guys, as you may have guessed.

The human actors were not stars, which comes as no surprise.  They were not undiscovered gems either which, in hindsight, also comes as no surprise.  This movie wasn't made for the discerning audience.  It was a cash grab designed to get people like me to buy tickets for people like my niece.  I contributed my $17.50 to the cause.

The computer animated characters interacted with the real people fairly well for the most part, although some egregious offenses to my sensibility did occur. In particular, I'm thinking of a sequence where the humans were high-fiving the bears (Yogi and Boo-Boo). It was embarrassingly fake, beyond any sequence that you would have seen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Mary Poppins.  In the year 2010 I expected better.

If I had bumped my head or something and decided to see this movie by myself, then no level of verbal disappointment expressed here could have been adequate.  I didn't decide to see it by myself though.  On the way out of the theater, my niece seemed to have had a decent time.  I didn't get the impression that she really liked the movie but she also didn't seem terribly disappointed.  She got a kick out of some of the gags and she hasn't been conditioned, as I have, with abject cynicism toward the lazy and generic good/evil story template.  For this reason alone, we'll give this movie one and a half out of five strings.