I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, and shit I'm still young. I'm probably going to make a lot more of them. I left here, that is one of my greatest regrets.

Hey, how've you been?

Alright, for the most part. Lot's of things going on.

HAAAAAAAAAAL!!! omg omg omg

Hi wisper, long time no see.

Welcome back, Hal. You know...you can never leave this place. It will always be up your ass.

where's my money bitch.

Dude! How long have you been gone? Years! Are you still in Montana? (You were in Missoula with TBone, right?)

didn't you get married or some shit?

Yeah. To pez. :P

Hi, Hal! To welcome you back in true Sorabji style, I'm hijacking this thread. So... WHAT'S EVERYBODY COOKING THIS WEEKEND? (If you are Jewish or anything else, please amend the previous sentence to suit your holiday needs)

Hooray, Hal! We are making dim sum. And perhaps other small delicious Chinese dishes.

We're making a variation of the traditional Italian 12-fish Christmas Eve dinner. Except my aunt doesn't like fish fish, if you know what she means, so we're having scallops, crab, shrimp, calamari, and mussels. We haven't discussed the side dishes yet. I'd be happy with some kind of mushroom dish -- I'm a fiend for mushrooms. My mom has a great recipe for mushroom caps stuffed with spinach and goat cheese and pine nuts, dressed with a mushroom sherry(?) sauce....I'll try to talk her into making that. Christmas night, we're going out to dinner. Yeah, that's what I think, too, but I guess that's what you do when you're in Las Vegas (and there are 20 people in your family and half of them aren't speaking to the other half). Lord. What are you having, Agatha?

hopefully prime rib and yorkshire puddings. but i'm not in control, so we'll have to see.

I'm making vegetarian borscht with toppins (boiled eggs, potatoes, yogurt, etc). My friends Jen and James, with whom we spend Christmas, have a tradition of making pierogies, so I thought borscht would be a good accompaniment. Then I started thinking it was maybe a strange choice, but I already bought all of the stuff. Dave decided to make beef stew, which he is pursuing with the singularity of purpose that he always gets when he cooks something. He has done his research and looked at about twenty to thirty different recipes. I am also making this: http://orangette.blogspot.com/2005/12/plain-jane-with-chickpeas.html And, of course, the beer cheese. Always with the beer cheese. My sister's boyfriend is making a turkey, and my sister is making pineapple upside down cake. My friends Shannon and Vaughn are making a salad. These are all the holiday foods that I have any awareness of. I know that's a bad sentence, but I couldn't figure out how to fix it.

PS- I'm not a huge fan of mushrooms, but your mom's sound GRUB, spidey. What the hell is yorkshire pudding, anyhow? You will make dim sum I say "yum it all to hell!" Enjoy your festive day

Yes, I am Married. The wife is cooking massive amounts of food for the 2 of us. A decent eve dinner, but the majority of the food to be eaten haxmas day. LOT's of food. Other then that, we're going to do not much else. Exchange gifts on Monday, and relax. I don't have to work again till Tuesday night, so I'm just trying to relax.

Who did you marry, Hal? Catch us up a little- sheeeiiit!

I married a webdesiger with a rare case of MD.

yorkshire pudding is a lot like a popover but made with hot suet [if made properly] greasy, puffy, air-filled bread things my mom made prime rib and yorkshires for thanksgiving because i was not going to be there for xmas SO GOOD i think she is losing her sense of taste because she finally started using enough salt in everything

Our menu has changed. I'm making: mushrooms stuffed with crab pasta in a white wine sauce with clams, crab, and shrimp My mom's making: breaded scallops (These things are the size of a woman's palm -- I nearly went weak at the knees when I saw them in our refridgerator. I love scallops.) green beans with slivered almonds and maybe bacon My cousin's making: carrot cake her renowned pound cake

I'm making Glazed Ham Mediterranean salad Hot German Potato Salad Asparagus Waldorf salad Harvard Beets Potato Rolls (store bought) Cheese Cake (store bought because someone let me down or I would have made a baccardi rum cake). I got up to pee last night and really hurt my foot when I ran into a vacume that wasn't suppose to be there. Owww!

Oh,a veggie platter and a cheese ball.

Yum. I LOVE cheese Balls. Merry Christmas J

We had a Cuban Christmas: roast pork, yellow rice w/black beans, slow-cooked green beans and Cuban bread. it was yum. also lots of sweets: peanut butter fudge pie, Dale-n-Thomas chocolate and caramel drizzled popcorn, ginger cookies, raisin oatmeal cookies and so much more than I can't even remember now in my sugar-induced coma. And best of all, the lowlife Dallas Cowboys lost to my second-most-hated NFL team, the Philly Eagles. Plus, the Bulls won their Bowl game. Life is so good.

I had a ham sandwich and grapefruit juice.

I had dim sum for breakfast on Clement Street, and the heel end of a stale baguette for dinner with some goat cheese.

I went to the Gold Coast for dinner tonight. It wasn't half bad. I had filet mignon, and then I won $9 on the nickel slots.

i had a french dish, pot-au-fau. i wonder if pho is related?

my current maybe-gf is from the gold coast of Oz. but she talks about money and urine a few too often. sitting in a post-Jets-win pub. going home for pork chops and water. go Jets!

we slept all day and made scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast at five pee'emm i threw out the bacon because it tasted funny

speaking of tasting funny, i pulled the cork from both ends saturday night. stayed up till dawn frothing from either opening of the tube-within-a-tube. the zenith of the ultramegayawn came in the steam of the shower. i deposited the remains of the daily bread into the tub, filling the bottom from stem to stern before realizing that it would clog the drain rather than just slip on by. i won't go into further details, other than to say the next phase came chilled and wet and naked, and from the southern port. poisoned by something i ate, they surmise. i won't argue. it seems to have mostly left me. it did yield a phone call to mom early in the morning of christmas eve. "mother, at which point does one decide that he is dehydrated enough to warrant a voy-age to the hos-pit-apul?" i answered her questions like a dutiful son and she was on my doorstep within an hour with quarts of foul flavored electrolyte beverages. she said both that this is the first time in a decade that i've called on her for help, and that a mother likes the opportunity to help her son in need. i do not know if i should feel more guilty about not providing her sufficient opportunity, or about sleeping, fevered, dehyrdated, while my mother scooped my vomit from my tub, and,for god knows what reason, my father cleaned my kitchen. then, tonight, after my fire pot and home again, a dear friend of mine called and told me about her sadness. it was some sadness that i am certain most people of an age have found, wherein you reach a condition of apparent stall, and your job is a nowhere job, and you haven't applied for that next phase of school, and you really feel like you're not doing the right things with your life. she did compare and contrast with my fancy life and my fancy job and my fancy ability to appear completely together with everything (though, for her, replace 'appear' with 'be', as it is, the one of the three fancinesses that i actually possess.) so i asked her how old she is. she said, almost twenty-three. and then, by example, i told her what kind of beer and pot, shady, scumbag, directionless, worthless puck of a man i was at twenty-three. to which she laughed. so, mission accompished, as it were. and two christmas miracles: her sadness lifted, however momentarily. and my kitchen is clean. god bless and merry christmas. and to the oppressed, i hope your chaka-kahn went off with a bang. no, not a bang. but pretty candles. and if kwanza is real and not some kind of bizarre, inside-the-cia-joke, state-run propaganda, merry-happy-however. everyone, peace. this could be a beautiful year coming if we all decide to play it nice. faith, hope, and love.

RIP James Brown.

goodbye to the godfather of soul. fucking hell. though, the silver lining, there are going to be some great retrospectives on the tv now. "i won't go into further details" - since when has this been a place to avoid going into depth about serious puke and shit topics? what are you, british?

british, no. rather, i believe, i am somewhere near you and the bay fed by sixteen rivers. you've covered the details. they've been beaten to death. they are uninteresting, base, unnecessary.

It was boxing day, and i've never been out on boxing day before. But Rowlfe is a fan of it, so i went. It was exciting i guess, the crowds and the madness. And there were truly many fabulous bargains. Best Buy had the new 007 sets for $45 each so i got two of them. Everyone is sick of hearing about how i now have 10 James Bond movies to watch. And i got that massive Alien DVD box thing for less than half price. I've been waiting years for it to get that cheap. Very few people know about my love for 007 and the Alien series, they just don't expect it from me. I often think i'll get some sort of stylized Alien tattoo.

please tell me dr. no is your favorite.

I never really got into the James Bond series. Wisper, tell me what I'm missing. I'm a little bummed that my Clive Owen love/lust has waned considerably since the last time I saw him in anything. I just watched "Bent" and was so disappointed. Maybe if the dialogue hadn't sounded like a high school parody of "Waiting for Godot" I would have been able to focus on the Ugly Sexy a little more intently. GOD, THE DIALOGUE. And no one was sympathetic in the least. Call me a complacent viewer if you will, but I need to care about somebody, jeez, if I'm to enjoy a movie. And they don't have to be "good" -- I watched six seasons of "OZ" and loved damn near everybody, and damn near everybody was a nasty piece of work. But they were layered and vastly entertaining. Clive Owen in "Bent" -- couldn't care a fig, and his acting was inexcusably bad in some scenes. And, I'm so sad to say, he just isn't doing anything for me anymore. I used to be all about the ugly, crooked-nosed, rough ex-boxer-looking fellows, but, God help me, the tide seems to be turning. Sean Bean is still smokin', though. Sean Bean, I will cling to thee in my dreams forever. ...And to bring this full circle, Daniel Craig is rough-looking and hot. Maybe I should go see "Casino Royale."

Wisper, are you one of the few who actually likes the third and fourth Alien movies too?

likes? I always say that boys love 2 and girls love 3. I love Alien 3. It's my favorite. It's so bleak and poetic. The dog-hybrid alien stalks atop my computer monitor. Which i was just thinking about, since i don't really care for anything else David Fincher has ever done. But i love the tragedy and the consistent black & gold tones. And it cemented what i always thought the movies were really about- that the aliens are not the enemies at all really. The Company is what's truly evil. I like that. And i like 4 as well, while once again i despise Joss Whedon's entire career. Seriously. So i also love that he hates the final film. It's silly and character driven. I like super sexy psycho animal Ripley, and the male cast is like nerd-girl porn. Ron Perlman? Michael Wincott? And my main man, Wormtongue himself, Brad motherfuckin Dourif. Dude. I like that it's so different than the other ones, and it's so nice looking too, since they used special custom film stock to make the darkest blacks possible. Don't tell me that Ripley giving in to the sea of aliens that envelops her isn't beautiful. So beautiful and Giger-ish. Hell, i even liked Alien vs Predator. I love how awful it is, and how it unexpectedly turns into a buddy comedy.

....v @ an alien film fest? v votes Aien,forever,just keep in Ripley.,thats most essential....and v wants the next episode FAST...dont you?

3 is my fave, and while I can't stand 4 (because Whinona makes me cringe) I, too, have a major Dourif-on (and a massive Ron Perlman crush - dude, he is almost better than Sean Connery in the Name of the Rose and lovelovelove him in Cronos). 2 is ok, but mostly just because I love Jenette Goldstein (best in this role, then second best in Near Dark - which is really the bitch wickedest thing about 2). I mean, there's nothing really wrong with 2 - it's just entirely too quotable without being...epic. My favorite Bond film - which does NOT have my favorite Bond in it - is "Live and Let Die" because it's the first movie I remember seeing. I remember waking up in the backseat of the Opal station wagon (named "Little Red") and seeing Yaphet Khotto (sp?) being a bad ass at Sissification Personified Moore.

Margret,,you know,v regards Sean Connery as one of the best guys in world,but its a shame he cant shift that Scottich accent,not even in "Red October"....you know what pisses me off?,he claims to be from Vilnius,capital city of Lithuania,but we call it Vilnus,and have for a long time.

...its like a Chinese person calling calling New York, (No Work)....bit of an insult.

Perlman and Dourif are two of my most favorite actors ever, which is one reason I like 4 so much. that plus I'm a big fan of Jeunet. I agree that 3 was the best of the sequels. It really got you into how awful society can be.

You've seen "The City of Lost Children," right, Sem? (It's a Jeunet film with Ron Perleman.)

lost children is awesome. i had no idea he directed aliens 4. netflix. here comes i.

oh shit, and the awesome little wheelchair guy is the angry cafe dude who loves the cigarette girl in Amélie. Hahahaha. You should really see it asap, Nate. It maintains a strange level of Jeunet's signature cuteness. "Who do I have to fuck to get off this boat?"

That wheelchair guy, Dominic something or other, is in all of Jeunet's films. I think I've seen them all so far, or at least all that I am aware of. I really enjoyed his last film, A Very Long Engagement. That's the thing about Alien 4 - when you go into it knowing it's a Jeunet film, it really makes a lot more sense. If you aren't familiar with Jeunet's style, and you just expect more Cameron- style insane bugfuckery, then of course you're disappointed.

Dominic Pignon. In "the City of Lost Children," he plays multiple narcoleptic clones.

He kicked ass in Diva.

I don't know... I liked 3.

i just heard some cats raping each other on my front porch. that reminds me of a joke my friend came up with. Q: How do you piss off a lesbian? A: Rape her. now is that fucked up or what.

tsk