So I get to the store and looked around. I couldn’t find the guitar anywhere. The clerks are those “I’m too cool to acknowledge customers” types. I finally got a clerk to talk to me, and to shorten the story, here’s what happened:

Clerk: “I’ve never heard of that guitar.”

After finding it on their website and showing that they have it in stock.

Clerk: “Well, we have guitars almost like it over there.”

After telling him I drove to see that particular guitar.

Clerk: “We’ll it must be around here somewhere.”

Me staring at him.

Clerk: “I’ll go and look for it.”

I kept looking around myself but he never came to get me. I was about ready to leave when I saw the clerk playing the guitar I wanted. I went up to him and said, “Oh, you found it.”

His response was, “Yep, it was in the back. It wasn’t out because it hasn’t been set up yet.” He then handed it to me.

Anyway, I played it and it wasn’t quite as awesome as I expected, I expected it to be heavier, but I still wanted to buy it. I asked someone who walked by if he worked there. He said he did. I asked if they could give a deal on the guitar.

His response: “Nope, the price on the tag is what we sell it for.”

I replied, “Amazon and Guitar Center are selling it for $669. You can’t go any lower.”*

His response, “Well, you should buy it from them.”

And here’s the killer line he said, “Unless you want to support local businesses, if you do you should buy it from us.”

In a nutshell, their plan to compete against more efficient competitors is to proclaim, “Buy from us if you want to support us!”

I’m sorry. And I don’t mean to be rude, but if your business model is: “Buy from us if you want to.” You should go out of business.

Elderly’s is a corporation with the sole goal of obtaining profit, just like Amazon, only on a much much smaller. However, Amazon did not become the retail giant it is merely because it paid people to shrug their shoulders and say, “Buy from us if you want to support us.”

Amazon became huge because it focused on giving customers non-circular reasons to buy. Four of ‘em actually: Low prices. Cheap/free/fast shipping. Bending-over-backwards customer service. And ensuring as hard as possible that you never have to pay sales taxes.

Amazon gives me four reasons to buy. Elderly’s, you could not be bothered to give me one.

Will you go out of business? Maybe, but probably not. There was a hipster record/CD store in my area called School Kids which has long since went out of business.

Their prices were outrageously high. But they had everything you wanted. The selection was simply astonishing. Since you had it in your hand, you simply bought it there rather than try to find it cheaper elsewhere. However, Amazon’s selection of everything at dirt cheap prices and fast free shipping eliminated School Kids Records pretty quickly.

I personally think Elderly’s and places like it will survive longer mostly because of ignorance. And not the ignorance that you can buy stuff cheaper on the net. It’s a different type of ignorance. The ignorance musicians have over their own instruments.

Hanging out at a local music store one day I overheard a guy bringing in his guitar to have the strings changed. After he left I made fun of him with the clerk. He said it’s actually worse, some people bring their guitars in to be tuned!

I find it amazing that someone would take the time to learn complex chords and scales, but cannot be bothered to learn how turn a peg or use an allen wrench.

And that’s Elderly’s real plan to compete, but it’s unspoken so as not to offend. Ignorant musicians can buy at Eldery’s knowing they have a place to have trivial things “fixed” on the instrument. You know, utterly complicated things like setting intonation or straightening a neck. (Yes, dear, that was sarcasm.)

Still, I wouldn’t want to be in Eldery’s shoes. If your business model is actually relying on the ignorance of your customers, you risk losing your entire business once they wise up. If that ever happens, all of those hipster clerks will have to find some other place to be paid to ignore customers.

* I just wanted to add that I did not expect Eldery’s to give me the $669 price. I realize that internet and big box stores have a higher volume which means they can sell lower. I was willing to pay more for buying it from Elderly’s because it was in my hand and so I could use it at practice the next day, I just didn’t want to pay full price. Nearly any capitulation on their part probably would have been enough to get me to buy, e.g., set of strings, 10 bucks off, strap-locks, etc. However, a shrug was not enough.

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Several years ago Mike Myers was ridiculed for the release of the god-awful movie The Love Guru. But you know what, he’s always sucked. Myers’ entire career consists of creating cliched stereotyped characters and having them say mundane things. In other words, he simply does not know how to be funny.

Let’s look back at So I Married an Axe Murderer. It was his second movie. In addition to playing the main character, he also played his character’s dad. He played that dad as a loud stereotypical Scottish man. The dad said utterly mundane things very loudly. He talked about soccer. About his younger son’s large head. About his other son’s reluctance to get married.

The writers of So I Married an Axe Murderer did try to stretch the dad’s character a bit and had him dancing and singing along to the Bay City Roller classic, Saturday Night. They also had the dad sing Do You Think I’m Sexy accompanied by bagpipes. While those were certainly not stereotypical of old Scottish men, they were certainly also not funny.

Having a stereotyped character act stereotypical is not funny. Just as merely having that same stereotyped character do something out of his stereotype also is not funny. Nothing the dad said or did was actually funny. It’s almost as if Myers is from an alien culture which has no clue what humans consider funny. Or even what “funny” means.

And even the main character Myers plays in So I Married an Axe Murderer is stereotyped. The movie called for a character who dates, so that’s what Myers gave them. His character has no given job, education, or background. He exists purely as a person who dates and dumps women and then does beat poetry about it. So all the “jokes” which occur are nothing more than things people ordinarily would say during dates. In other words, they’re not funny.

Read through these so called “memorable quotes” from So I Married an Axe Murderer to see how unfunny the movie actually is. These are the “best” lines and none of them are funny.

Or how about his most famous character. Wayne from Wayne’s World. In that movie he played a stereotypical metal-head teenager from the 80s. His character said things typical of metal kids from that time period. But merely saying things that people say is not funny.

Or his other famous character, Austin Powers. In that role he played a stereotypical British spy who said stereotypical British slang in a stereotypical British accent, like “baby.”

Why is saying British slang funny? It’s not. So the real question is why Myers thinks repeating slang is funny? As I said, he does not have a clue about what “funny” is.

I’ll continue, on SNL Myers did a character named Linda Richman. She was his stereotypical “jewish female” character. She said “verklempt.” Why? Because apparently that’s what jewish women say. Why is it funny? It’s not.

I could go on and on. It’s not just that The Love Guru wasn’t funny. It’s really that Myers isn’t funny. At all.

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The premise is that a 13 year old, black, 4 and 1/2 foot tall, orphan living at an evil orphanage, finds a pair of basketball shoes that might have been previously owned by Michael Jordan. He makes a wish on the shoes, gets struck by lightening, and suddenly he’s the greatest basketball player ever.

Through a series of events that could only happen in a movie underwritten by the NBA (seriously), the kid is signed to a play for the NBA.

He gets paired up with another player to mentor him, and you immediately know the kid will teach the mentor the real meaning of life, and eventually, the mentor will adopt him.

Anyway, the amazing thing about the movie is that is portrays an alternative universe wherein racism and even racial differences do not exist. In other words, the fact that the boy and mentor are black simply never comes into play.

The only other raceless movie I can think of involving a black main character goes back to Richard Pryor’s Brewster’s Millions.

I’m not a member of a minority. So I cannot fully imagine what it would be like to grow up subjected to racism. However, I certainly understand that if you grew up with racism and eventually became a movie director, you’d want to explore the problems with racism. Accordingly, you’d make films about the problems of racism.

However, maybe for us to get past racism we need more films showing us what our world could be like without it.

BTW, the movie was a contrived, ham-fisted, and utterly predictable piece of crap. My 10 year old son loved it, though. Which is not surprising as he was certainly a member of the intended audience for it.

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Why?

It sucks. Not the Blu-ray transfer, that’s OK. The movie itself sucks. Yeah, you heard me.

Animal House is a great example of how we look back on our lives with rose-colored glasses. Among white boys who grew up in the 70s and 80s, Animal House is considered a classic comedy. It’s not.

It might have been a funny movie back in 1978. Heck, it might have been the funniest movie back in 1978. But it’s not a classic in any way shape or form.

I know what you’re thinking, John Belushi was in it. Yeah, he was. He says about three words in the entire movie. He was also the only funny person in the movie. And he wasn’t even that funny.**

One of the main characters in the movie was Otto played by Tim Matheson. Tim went on to play the bad guy in Fletch. He was also the bad guy in A Very Brady Sequel. He is not a comedic actor. His forte is playing douchebags. More on that later.

The other main character was Boon and was played by Peter Riegert. Peter was in Crossing Delancey and Traffic. He’s definitely not a comedic actor.

So the only comedian in this one hour and fifty minute comedic movie is John Belushi, and he’s barely in it. Well, let’s put it another way, he’s in the only funny scenes the movie has. And once again, they’re not even that funny.

You might argue that it was directed by John Landis. But, so fricken what?! Sure, he’s had some funny movies. He’s also had a load of awful movies, e.g., Blues Brothers 2000, Beverly Hills Cop III, The Stupids. And I really hate The Kentucky Fried Movie. Unless you’re really stoned, that movie is not even remotely funny.

The main problem with Animal House is that it’s just a simple, low budget, coming of age, raunchy comedy. These are released year after year (Porky’s, American Pie, Van Wilder, etc.) and they’re almost always crap. They’re not designed to be great. They’re designed to extract quick money from teenage boys.

They’re crap because the writers lowly aim to please those teenage boys, who apparently can find anything funny if they’re stoned enough. E.g., a fat guy crushing a beer can on his head. A fat guy eating out of a garbage can. A fat guy eating a lot of food for lunch. A fat guy looking up cheerleaders’ skirts. A fat guy jumping around like a squirrel. A fat guy spying on girls and falling from a ladder. A fat guy squirting mashed potatoes out of his mouth like a pimple. A fat guy smashing a guitar. I’m sure if you’re young and stoned, all of that is funny. But when you’re grown up and sober, it’s just stupid.

Another problem with Animal House is that, at its core, it’s not a comedy. As I said, it’s really a coming of age film. It’s about characters reflecting on their current paths and trying to figure out their futures. In other words, at its core, it’s a drama. And it’s a sucky and utterly contrived drama.

Because the writing is bad, the characters are poorly conceived, and the situations are contrived, you simply never care if Boon and Katy end up together or whether Otto ever learns there’s more to life than getting laid.

All of that drama is just filler placed between “funny” scenes with a dildo joke*** and a horse. It’s not there to tell us a story or to give us a better understanding of the characters, it’s there because adding fake drama saves the writers from coming up with actually funny scenes.

Speaking of contrived, contrived is defined as “Obviously planned or calculated; not spontaneous or natural; labored.” What it means in relation to works of fiction is that something happens solely because it’s written that way. The plot does not flow from any inherent logic or reason, but because someone wanted it to happen.

The ending of Animal House is a great example of contrived fiction. We’re asked to root for the members of Delta House. The movie presents them as heroes. (Why?! I’ll address that below.) Their frat is dis-chartered, they’re kicked out of college (based on their midterm grades?! Talk about contrived!****), and will likely be drafted to fight in Vietnam. In response to that, they commit major felonies, which I guess might keep them from being drafted because their asses would be in prison.

So how do the writers make this a happy ending? In the Blues Brothers movie, director Landis didn’t even try to make a happy ending. Everyone went to prison for their crimes. For Animal House, the writers simply wrote a happy ending, ignoring all logic and reason to the contrary, let alone the entire movie up to that point. Despite being kicked out of college and serving some time in prison, Bluto somehow ends up being a US Senator and marrying the woman he kidnapped. Otter becomes a physician. Specifically, a Beverly Hills gynecologist. Which is Hollywood-speak for a job that gets him laid a lot. Hoover becomes a lawyer. And Pinto becomes editor of National Lampoon magazine. Which means he somehow gets into Harvard?!

And why are these guys heroes, anyway? There’s a reason why the actor who played Otter played so many bad guys in other films. Otter’s the quintessential douche bag. He’s one of those asswhipes we all hate. He gets everything he wants in life not based on his talent, his drive, or his intellect, but because he’s good looking.

Boon has given up on life even though he’s only 21 years old. He has his whole life ahead of him, yet he lives only to get drunk or high. The only times you see him happy is when he’s trying to get acceptance into Black culture. He’s up on stage dancing and singing with Otis Day and the Knights at the frat house. And he tries to buddy-up to Otis Day when they find him and his band playing at a “Black” club. You can almost see his heart break when he realizes that racism goes both ways and Otis Day pretends not to know him.

Pinto statutorily rapes a girl he knows is a 13 year old virgin.

Bluto is simply a self centered, violent, mean, drunk, retard.

Flounder is the only guy I’d want to hang out with. Despite not being very good looking or street smart, he has an extremely hot girlfriend. He’s also funny, giving, and loyal. Who wouldn’t want a friend like that? I actually felt sorry for him throughout this movie. He’s the only guy in this whole movie with a conscience.

My pet peeve with coming of age movies is that they always use actors who are too fricken old. If the coming of age movie is supposed to be about high school kids, they use college age actors. If it’s about college students, they use actors in their late 20s and early thirties.

I’ll assume that most people enter college when they’re 18, go four years, and graduate when they’re 22 or 23. But the 18 year old freshmen in Animal House are 25 (Tom Hulce playing Pinto), 23 (Stephen Furst playing Flounder), and 20 (Kevin Bacon playing Chip Diller).

I’m sure you’re thinking those ages are pretty close. They’re not. Real college freshmen look like high school kids. They’re pimply. They’re tiny. They’re weak. They look like they can be squashed. Go and find your high school yearbook. Look at even the senior football players. Even at 18 they look like kids, because they are. Males age a lot from 18 to his early 20s. That’s when they finally start looking like men.

But let’s keep going. John Belushi was playing Bluto who was in his 7th year of college. (Oh that’s so funny!) Assuming again Bluto started college when he was 18, he should have been only 25. Yet Belushi was 30 when he played the role.

Tim Matheson, who played Otter, and Peter Riegert, who played Boon, were 31. As I mentioned before, it was specifically stated that Boon was 21 in the film.***** James Daughton, who played the likely gay Marmalard, was 28. And Mark Metcalf, who played Neidermeyer, was a whopping 32.

I simply cannot buy what I’m being sold when I watch Animal House (and most other coming of age/teen/college/raunchy comedies). I can’t figure out why these thirty year olds are pretending to be 21. They’re on the screen trying to figure out their futures, when to me, they look like they’re trying to relive their pasts.

I should point out that I can suspend my disbelief. I can believe that John Belushi is on a mission from god. Heck, I can even believe that John Belushi is a blues singer, despite all auditory evidence to the contrary. But in watching Animal House, I cannot believe he’s a 25 year old college student.

Hate me if you want. Trash my mere subjective opinions in the comments. But all I ask from you is this: If you disagree with me, rewatch the movie first. My guess is that you’ll be as disappointed as I was.

* I did force myself to watch the whole thing a few days later.

** If you think about it, John Belushi is highly overrated. Sure, he was in the original SNL. He was also in the Rutles, which was a very funny movie. But his role was very small. He was in 1941, which I liked as a kid, but I also liked Animal House as a kid. It was universally panned and flopped. He was in the Blues Brothers, which is considered a classic. He was in Continental Divide, which was a terrible romantic comedy actually written for Chevy Chase. Which would have made sense because Chevy Chase was not a bad looking guy back then. He was lastly in Neighbors, which is a movie I simply don’t remember. According to Wikipedia, it flopped and critics hated it.

Basically, the only good movie he was in was the Blues Brothers and that was good mostly due to Aykroyd’s vision and Landis ability to focus that vision. Animal House didn’t have a vision, so there was nothing for him to focus. It was just an excuse to show tits to high school kids. Back then, before internet porn, the only way we could see tits was to find our dad’s Playboy collection or to sneak into R rated films.

*** They didn’t even bother writing a dildo joke. To a teenager, merely seeing a giant dildo is worthy of laughter. The writers knew that. Which is the sole reason the dildo was in that initial scene with Boon and Otto.

**** The reason the writers had to expel members of Delta house based on their mid term grades was because of the big Home-Coming parade ending the movie had. Colleges simply don’t have end term parades. So the writers were stuck writing something ridiculous.

***** 44:35

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The point of the ad is that language is ambiguous. And due to that ambiguity, internet searches can be filled with irrelevant results.

The selling point of the ad is that somehow Bing cuts through the ambiguity inherent in language and somehow “knows” what you’re really searching for.

My hypothesis is that Microsoft has developed mind reading technology. To test that hypothesis I’ve decided to do three searches of the word “salsa.” During the first search I’ll think about how delicious salsa is to eat. During the second search I’ll think about how sexy salsa dancers are. And during the last search I’ll think about pink elephants. Here we go….

Ok, I’m back. I did the three searches and got the exact same results each time.

As you can see, Bing did not read my mind. Despite the fact that I was thinking about salsa to eat and sexy salsa dancers, I got results about bicycles. What’s up with that?! What does bicycles have to do with eating salsa or sexy salsa dancers?! And not once did I get any results about a pink elephant eating salsa or a sexy pink salsa dancing elephant.

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I think the only reason they cast any females in the movie was because they needed someone to wear the ridiculous high-heels the costume department came up with.

Speaking of high heels, human females wear them to make their legs appear longer and butts more shapely. Are computer programs actually concerned with such things? “Does this file system make my butt look big?”

It’s sad that computer programs have self-esteem issues merely because they’re designated as female.

Why is the movie called Tron Legacy? The Tron character only had a few seconds of screen time.

This problem goes back to the original Tron. Tron was just a secondary character in the first. Heck, he was a computer program written by a secondary character, so Tron was basically a tertiary character. It would be like if George Lucas had named Star Wars the Chewbacca Chronicles.

My guess is that originally the Tron character was supposed to play a much larger role in the first movie. But, for whatever reason, his role was cut down during the movie’s production or editing. And of course Disney was stuck with the name for the sequel.

This has been asked numerous times, but did the world really need a sequel to Tron? The original movie bombed when it was first released. And here’s the funny part, Disney recognizes that it was so crappy that they pulled all copies of it prior to the release of Legacy. You couldn’t rent it or buy it leading up to the release of Legacy.

Think about that. The original was so incredibly bad that Disney won’t let people watch it. But yet we needed a sequel to it. Wow. Just wow.

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I thought about installing Windows 98se or Windows 2000 Professional on it, but those OSes wouldn’t have the drivers to run the netbook’s hardware such as the networking, camera, blue-tooth, and touch-pad.

This past weekend I finally decided to try Ubuntu. I first tried the live CD of the latest version 10.10.

(I should point out that a live CD is a CD with the entire OS burned onto it. You simply boot to the CD and you can use the OS to test it out. I actually used Universal USB Installer to install the ISO to a flash driver and booted from there.)

Anyway, I’ve tried Linux before on other systems. The problem with Linux, in my view, is that its users treat it like a rite of passage. Nothing is easy. Nothing is consistent. No one is helpful. Their attitude is that since they had to suffer through everything, you should too. Something simple such as installing new software is a mess in Linux. In Windows you download what you want to install, double click it, and follow the prompts. In Linux it’s mostly a command based process. And of course it’s inconsistent. Some versions of Linux use APT, some use yum, some use tarballs, it’s a real mess.

Here’s another example from Ubuntu. Changing your workgroup name is pretty simple in Windows. If you don’t know where the dialog box is, you can type in help for “change workgroup” and it’ll tell you how and where. In Ubuntu, as all Linux variations, you manually edit files for such mundane tasks. But you can’t simply just find the correct file, open it, edit it, save it, and be done. Nor can you simply right click on the file, chose “edit as root” to edit it. No, you have to use the command line because system files are protected against modification. That’s what makes Linux so secure… and so annoying.

The only luck I’ve had with Linux in the past is when some company, I think it was Mandrake, offered a free download of their professional version of Linux. That version came with a hand to hold onto. It had built in MP3 and DVD support. It had an easy to use interface for installing software. It had dialog boxes for changing your screen resolution and the like. I got pretty comfortable using it to the point where i could intentionally fuck it up, but still boot into the command-line to fix it. Unfortunately, I had to stop using that system because my dad wanted a computer to use, so I formatted the drive, installed XP, and gave it to him.

Anyway, I decided to try Ubuntu on my son’s netbook because it’s marketed and designed for idiots like me. And over all, Ubuntu succeeds as a replacement for Windows, but you still have to be a nerd to get it to work.

The live CD of Ubuntu set up all of my hardware. It automatically detected my wireless connection. It was much more peppy than XP. That was great. However, there were problems I could not fix without being able to edit files, and I couldn’t edit those files because it was a live version of the OS, not an installed version. In other words, nothing was saved from boot to reboot. Because it was peppy enough and because all the hardware worked, I decided to go for it and wipe XP and install it. The installation went off without a hitch.

One problem with Ubuntu is that it won’t nicely connect to Windows PCs on the network. When you navigate to Windows computers you’ll get an error saying that it can’t mount that resource. In searching for a fix for this I found this goes back way before version 10.10.

This is complete BS. Ubuntu is supposed to be a consumer OS. It’s going to be used by people with Windows systems on their network. I’ve never had a problem navigating Windows computers with any other version of Linux I’ve tried. So it seems to be Ubuntu specific.

I tried fixing it by changing the name of the workgroup Ubuntu uses to match my network. So I had to find the correct command to use, open the file, edit the file, and save the file. The command to restart Samba (software Linux uses to connect to Windows’ networks) didn’t work. So I had to reboot the netbook. That fix didn’t work.

To make a long story short, I ended up getting around the problem by using the Windows PC’s specific IP address. This is not a solution. I had to set up my Windows server to a static IP address which is not very consumer friendly. And most consumers would not have thought about using IP addresses or figured out by poking around on Ubuntu how to do it. And this is a netbook, so it should be easy to take with you and access other Windows networks without much difficulty. My work-around is sort of like using a crow bar to open the glove box in my new car and then closing it by using duct tape. Sure, it’d work. But it’s not a solution.

Anyway, my son loves Ubuntu. He agrees his system is much faster than before. He’s able to get on his flash gaming sites, e.g., Poptropica and Not Doppler. Skype works great. He’s able to download tons of free games such as Alien Arena and Freedoom. (Get it? Freedoom, an open source version of Doom. Those open source guys are so clever! Seriously, what’s the emoticon for rolling your eyes?)

As I said, XP took up nearly the entire 8 gig internal flash drive, despite having hardly any software installed. Ubuntu takes up about four gigs, and that includes its own office suite. That left plenty of space left over for those games I was talking about.

And the best thing about Ubuntu, is that they finally fixed printing. I use a network printer and Ubuntu found it and installed it. Anyone who has tried to print in Linux knows it’s generally a fricking pain in the ass. Thanks Ubuntu for finally getting that right.

What I’d like to do is install Ubuntu on my wife’s computer, which currently runs Windows 7 x64. Because it’s centrally located, everyone uses it, and because of that, it tends to get viruses. Ubuntu’s security would put an end to that. But there is no iTunes client for Linux, and my wife has a fancy new iPhone 4, so that option is a no-go for now. However, I’m still considering it. I could keep iTunes on one of the other computers for loading up stuff. I also have to find some easy to use graphic programs to use with my scanner which is connected to my wife’s computer.

What I find most interesting about this Ubuntu experiment is the discovery that we really don’t use software anymore. Remember in the old days when Best Buy had isles of Windows specific software? That’s almost all gone. Facebook, gmail, Twitter, bittorrent, etc. doesn’t care what OS you’re using, as long as you have a browser. Any cool software is usually open sourced and cross-platform, e.g., VLC. And anything that remains is still cross platform, e.g., Skype. This also makes it much easier to try alternative operating systems.

What’s interesting is that it was Microsoft which killed off the third party PC software market. Anytime a third party introduced successful Windows software, Microsoft would enter the market with its own product. It didn’t take long for companies to realize that writing software for Windows was a losing proposition. Even if you succeeded with a great product, Microsoft would simply enter the market and wear you down until you were gone.

So I have to love the irony. Because Microsoft’s greed killed off the third party software market, we are now free to stop using Windows. Thanks Microsoft! Thanks a lot!

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It tells a story of a young, pretty, educated, and spoiled American woman who follows her boyfriend to Japan, only to be quickly dumped. She inexplicably decides to become a Ramen cook. (You’re probably wondering why I rented this movie. The reviews on Netflix said it was quite good. Unfortunately I completely disagree with those reviews.)

About half the dialog is in English and the rest is in Japanese. Also it was directed by an American named Robert Allan Ackerman. So technically it’s not a Japanese movie. But because of the large amount of Japanese dialog, the vast majority of American’s would never watch it either. It’s the worst of both worlds.

The very best thing about the movie is that the main character could not understand the Japanese characters, and vice versa. In other similar movies there are scenes where characters are inexplicably able to understand each other, despite not knowing each other’s language.

The worst thing is the late Brittany Murphy, who lacks any ability to act. Her “abilities” were OK in films such as Sin City where she was nothing more than eye candy. (And no one expects great acting in a Robert Rodriguez movie anyway.)

But in this movie she had the daunting task of making the audience believe that a beautiful, educated, and spoiled American woman would put up with demeaning work such as cleaning toilets and washing dishes to learn how to make Ramen. She failed.

While I believed the restaurant owner was really a restaurant owner. That his wife was really a restaurant owner’s wife. And that the main character’s Japanese/Korean boyfriend wanted to bed a hot American chick. I never even for a second believed anything about the main character, including her motivation.

The movie also had a problem in using Ramen as its central dish. In the US every college kid lived off the freeze dried variety of Ramen. So in my mind, it’d be like a Japanese person coming here to learn how to make boxed macaroni and cheese.

Thus the movie had to explain why Ramen is so special and why it is so difficult to make. It fails. There are unbelievable scenes where Ramen produces “magical” effects on the moods of those eating it. There are also speeches about how you must make Ramen with your heart, not with your brain. But when the main character finally makes Ramen with her heart, she still fails when a Romen master refuses to give her his blessing. So all of those speeches were just a waste of time.

The ending was also really bizarre, and I can’t help but think it wasn’t changed at the last minute. During the movie we learn that the restaurant owner’s son left for France to become a chef, leaving the owner without a successor. Because the main character failed at obtaining the Master’s blessing, he lost a bet with a rival and had to give up cooking Ramen forever. Without a Ramen cook his restaurant would have to close. Mmm….

There’s a “touching” scene where the owner tells the main character that he wants her to be his successor. To make sure she understands he uses a book to translate what he’s saying into English. Being a touching moment, she’s very touched by the request and agrees to be his successor. The restaurant is saved, right?

Nope. For some inexplicable reason, the very next scene shows her leaving Japan for American where she opens up her own Ramen shop in New York.

Wow. Simply wow. There was nothing in the movie telling us that she wanted to go back to the US. In fact it was pretty clear that she had nothing to go back for.

Was the movie trying to tell us that she’s still a selfish bitch? Did the owner sell the restaurant to his rival? We don’t know. We do know the “touching” scene we saw before was rendered pointless.

Every so often you hear about famous movie characters who were supposed to be played by other actors. For example, Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name was supposed to be played by non-actor bodybuilder Steve Reeves. The studio wanted Kevin Costner to play Neo in the Matrix. And of course Tom Selleck was all set to play Indiana Jones, instead of Harrison Ford.

When you hear about such asinine casting choices you can’t help but think those hugely successful movies would have failed. And failed hard.

I’ve thought that maybe the reverse could sometimes be true. Maybe there are sucky movies out there that would have been great if the right actress/actor had been cast.

I can’t help but think that the Ramen Girl could have been a better movie with a better actress playing the lead. However, because of the underlying plot problems I described above, it still would not have been a great one.

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To me he’s famous for one and only one reason. He’s incredibly good looking.

He’s the perfect example of style over substance. He has never written a great song nor has he ever played a great note. He’s a stylish white guy singing black music to sell vinyl discs to white teens.

I know what you’re thinking. Elvis can sing. Sure he can sing. I have no doubt he can sing. But if American Idol has taught us anything, it’s that there are plenty of talentless people in the world who can sing very well.

I’m also guessing that you think the recordings he made with Sun Studio are awesome. They were. But Elvis did not make those recording. He did not write the songs, pick the band, create the arraignments, etc., etc., etc. He was told to show up and sing and he did.

It’s not as if Elvis did those Sun recordings because he had some artistic vision. He was simply a cog in a process which, through no fault or effort from him, created something great. Once he was offered a gravy train of selling white-washed black music to white teens he jumped at the chance.

And don’t even get me started on his “come back” special. Too late, I’m already started.

How could teaming up with a sewing machine company, going on a major network, and playing the same songs you’ve been playing for the past decade be considered a come back?!

Not many artists can come back. The best example I can think of is the band Aerosmith. In the early 80s they were basically washed up. Their CDs were barely selling gold and were barely charting.

But then Run-D.M.C. had a huge hit in 1986 covering Walk This Way with members of Aerosmith appearing in the video. Aerosmith’s next album went 5x platinum. Their next, went 7x. Their next, 7x platinum again.

Now that’s a fricken come back. And I despise Aerosmith’s music, but at least they made a legitimate come back, played their own instruments, and wrote some of their own songs. Unlike Elvis who had great hair, thought he was a cop, and wore high-collared jumpsuits with capes.

If Elvis is the King of rock & roll, I want to be deported.

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Spider II 112 packs 12 insane amp models, 7 psychotic effects, and 75-watts of juice into one powerful and destructive combo. Now take a look inside the twisted mind of an amp with nothing to lose.
* 12 amp models that deliver a complete range from Clean to Insane
* 7 Smart Control effects (up to 3 simultaneous) including Tape Echo, standard Delay, Sweep Echo (all w/Tap Tempo), Chorus/Flanger, Phaser, Tremolo and Reverb
* 4 User-programmable channels
* Built-in front panel Tuner
* Enough power to kill pesky Chupacabras and Evil Payasos

Hemingway would have been proud of such understated subtlety.

If you can’t tell from the insane and utterly twisted description, dude, it’s a 75 watt amp driving a 12 inch 8 ohm Celestion speaker. And despite being relatively small, it’s loud with killer bass/bottom. Very fricken loud.

It’s one of those newfangled digital modeling guitar amplifiers. Basically by using digital technology it can make your guitar sound like a “’68 Marshall,” “’60s Fender amps,” or even “crisp, amazing clean tones all the way to warm jazz tones.”

I’ll get this out of the way. I’m not a tube snob. I’ve had two tube amps in my guitar playing past, but I prefer solid state amps because they’re more reliable. With tube amps, not only are you never certain they are going to work. You are never certain how they are going to sound. Different weather conditions, e.g., humidity, made them sound different from show to show.

I’ll admit that ideally tube amps sound better than solid state amps. I’d certainly rather use tube amps in the studio. But for day-to-day use I’m a solid state kind of guy.

With that out of the way I’ll say this. There is no fricken way this amp could be mistaken for a tube amp. I’ve played through Marshalls and extensively through a Fender Twin, there is no way this one sounds as either. Sure, they sound like them, but in the same way that Bon Jovi sounds like hard rock without being hard rock. The amp only offers approximations of those other amps.

Even the “insane” setting (yes, there really is an insane setting) sounds pristine, polished, clean. If that makes any sense.

The main problem I have with such built in effects is that there is little chance of a guitar player coming up with his or her own sound. Marshalls were like blank canvasses. Hendrix made them sound different from Townshend, who made them sound different from Iommi, etc., etc..

But if three different players chose the “’68 Marshall” setting on their Line 6 amps, they’re going to sound the same. Such built in effects, or “models” as they’re apparently called now, do not expand a guitarist’s pallet, they ironically narrow it.

Anyway, enough of me bitching. The amp has a built in headphone/output jack that actually works. The output is a nice touch. I used to have a similar output in a small Fender amp I used. You can just plug it directly into the P.A. system if you’re playing a show and you don’t have to worry about your own volume.

I said it before, the amp is loud. And I’m shocked at how low the bass is. It actually moves furniture without being muddy or distorting in a bad way.

It has built in vibrato like the Fender amps it’s supposed to approximate. I’ve never liked vibrato.

It has a nice sounding reverb setting, which I do like. You don’t realize how dry a guitar sounds until you take away the slight reverb.

It has a delay/tape loop effect. I’ll never use that. It’s something that sounds good until I actually try to use it in a song. Then it’s just annoying. But it does sound good if you need that sort of thing.

It also has Chorus/Flanger and Phaser. I used to use Chorus quite a bit back in the 90s. I’m not sure anyone still does. It sounds dated to me. But all of them sound good if you do want them.

It has a built in tuner. It automatically turns off the amp when you’re tuning so no one can hear you tune. It’s a nice touch. But if that’s what a new player learns to tune on, s/he’ll never really learn to tune as s/he’ll never hear when it’s right. That’s just a minor complaint about young whippersnappers, not about the amp, though. Clearly, the amp has to go off when you tune.

You can buy separate foot pedal/controllers for about 100 bucks. Some offer a wah pedal, but from what I’ve read and hear, it’s not very good. Some give you a foot controlled volume pedal, which is a great idea. You can also chose from between 4 preset settings set via the settings on your amp’s setting knobs.

The foot controllers with my Crate, Peavey, Fender, and Carvin amps only gave me two options, distorted and less distorted/clean. Having four would be pretty handy. I definitely could have used that in a band I was in called Worrystone. I’d have to go from a Telecaster twang, to a powerful crunch, to clean funk all in the same song.

No guitar amplifier review would be complete without the ultimate test. I have an original Gibson EB3 bass. It has a “number 1″ setting which makes a normal bass sound about an octave lower. Think 808 bass. A quality amp should be able to endure the number 1 setting without distorting or crapping out. The Spider II did admirably. It filled the house with a low throbbing noise which made the dog and cats run in to see what the frick was going on.

Overall it’s a pretty damn good amp and I got it for an amazing price. I almost sort of thought it might have been stolen because the guy was so eager to sell it so cheap. But he knew too much about how to work it to have just stolen it.

Since I haven’t really played guitar since the 90s, the company Line 6 is completely new to me. In a way the company is similar to Peavey’s 80′s attempt to appeal to metal heads. The pristine cleanness of the amp also reminds me of Roland amps.

All and all I’m glad I bought it. I only wish I had a band to try it out in.

Update 07-23-10: I recently bought a Line 6 FBV Express MkII 4-button Foot Controller for my Spider II. As I wrote above, the amp has four models you can preset, which could be really handy. It also includes a foot pedal which could be used for either volume control or wah. Both work well. Lastly, you can control the built in tuner with the FBV Express MkII, which would be handy to quickly and discretely tune in a live situation.

Unfortunately I had to buy the FBV Express MkII brand new, so it doubled the price of my amp. I justified the purchase by recognizing that five different pedals, including a wah, would have cost a heck of a lot more.

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