Mulling over media

While up with Miss T in the wee hours this morning, I caught the last few minutes of Monk on USA.  After it ended, this message appeared on the screen:  We will now join the USA Network programming already in progress.  Wait, what?  Monk is original USA programming.  It’s not like I had been watching some breaking news story or special weather report that preempted the regular show.  In essence what they were saying here is something along the lines of We will now interrupt our show that actually just ended to show you a movie in its entirety, starting right on the hour just like usual. 

The movie that came on was Lionheart, which I had seen before (okay, honestly I have seen it multiple times for reasons even I don’t fully understand).   Ha ha HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.  Oh, so very very bad.  The plot is lame and the dialogue laughable.  Short synopsis:  Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a guy who goes AWOL from the Foreign Legion because he gets word that his younger brother is on his deathbed, so he heads to L.A. to find his brother’s family and gets caught up in a street-fighting ring along the way.  I will admit that there are some excellent fight scenes, but that is really the only reason to watch this.  Van Damme is undoubtedly a talented martial artist, but his acting is extremely stiff.  And his attire begs the question:  Why are his pants always hiked up to his armpits?  Does this make for a more effective street fight? 

I know I have mentioned it before, but I continue to be extremely baffled by the keyword function on IMDb.  COME ON.  Are people really searching for movies using the phrase “body landing on car“?  I don’t know, but they have the option.  Or look!  You can do a combo search using “body landing on car”, “blood spatter” and “coffin” and you get Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.  A movie which I don’t think is necessarily best described by those three phrases.  I freely admit that I may be missing the point, but I’m sorry.  This just seems like a totally useless method of searching for a movie.  And some of the available related keywords are downright disturbing.  Please tell me I’m not the only one that thinks people specifically searching only for movies involving some of these phrases might be a little bit…off.

Wondering at work

If you arrived to work before all of your co-workers each day, and you had your pick of the entire lot, where would you park?  Am I the only anal-retentive creature of habit that would choose to park in the same exact spot every day?  I attempt to do this anyway, even though I arrive at 8 a.m. with most of the other employees.  However, there is someone who gets here at 7:30 each morning and parks in a totally different and apparently randomly selected spot every day.  Some days the car faces the building, some days away.  Sometimes it is close to the lightpost, some days more in the center of the row.  WHY?  Why would you not park in the same exact spot if available?  And why are you not approaching work from the same direction each day?  Isn’t this what is indicated by the varying directions that your car faces?  Or perhaps the best question of all, WHY DO I CARE SO MUCH?

Yesterday morning I received an e-mail from an outside sponsor at 9:33 a.m.  It contained a list of items that needed to be changed and/or clarified in a budget that was previously submitted.  The e-mail requested that all items be fixed and returned no later than noon.  Am I wrong in being angry about this?  What if I wasn’t at my desk to get the e-mail right when it came in?  Or what if I was out of the office entirely?  There was no follow-up phone call to confirm receipt of the e-mail, and no one was copied on it.  And even if I opened my e-mail immediately, this left me just under 2.5 hours to make the rather extensive changes being requested.   In my opinion this is already an irritating scenario.  But here’s the kicker:  the original proposal and budget had been submitted to this sponsor two weeks prior.  The program manager had been sitting on it for two solid weeks, then gives me 2.5 hours to turn around and come up with the information that they wanted.  Frustrating, no? 

Ruminations on the relatives

Please explain to me how it is that an infant whose room is located entirely across the house from my own can immediately tell when I have mentally declared her sound asleep and taken off my glasses in an attempt to go back to sleep myself, and she chooses that exact moment to cry.  I’m serious.  Please tell me, I am really asking here.  This happens to me almost every single night no matter how long I lie in bed willing her to be asleep.  Whether I wait 5 minutes or 30, if she is going to wake back up she does so exactly as my glasses hit the nightstand.  Uncanny, I tell you.  My son could do it too.  Do my children have psychic abilities?  Creepy.

Self-introspection

Hot tea is a hell of a lot better with sugar in it.  Why has it taken me this long to figure that out?