On the podcast Brendan and I have asserted before that in order to properly judge a year of films, you have to let it percolate for five years. I mean, a knee-jerk clamoring for movies that are clearly not great by any stretch of the imagination is a problem for the Oscars. I’m looking at you Crash, The King’s Speech, Argo, Birdman.

So since the Oscars are upon us at the end of the month, we decided to look back on films from 2010. You can look back at the winners of the Oscars for that year and see just how unmemorable most of the movies are. The King’s Speech? We can and will do better than that.

Brendan and I will list five (or so) movies that we really loved from that year. I already know there is going to be at least one disagreement, so that should be fun.

But in preparing for this endeavor, I made a list of movies that I have to watch (or rewatch as the case may be.)

Inception
Social Network
Fighter
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Tiny Furniture
Rabbit Hole
Life During Wartime
The Kids Are All Right
Dogtooth
Easy A
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Trash Humpers
Winter’s Bone
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
Blue Valentine
Biutiful
Kaboom
Heartbeats
Film Socialisme
The Housemaid
Howl

Am I missing some hidden gem? Something vital?

It should also be noted that this list of 21 films is not meant as an endorsement by me. There are a couple up there I really didn’t like.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know it was going to be warm and breezy. I knew it was going to get over 85F here in the Pedro, but I needed to be outdoors and moving. Besides it’s rare that I get bad allergies like my mom whose sneeze could crush eardrums — if I get hard of hearing in my later life, I will not blame the My Bloody Valentine concert I went to in 2008; that I will bestow solely on my mother.

After the first hill, on came the sneezes one after the other like a jackhammer punctuating the silence. By the time I came back home the nose water was flowing. By the evening the sinuses were pulsating in protest. And all around my desk were wads of used tissue that I set down hoping to use every available square inch before disposing. Jeez, I have become my mother.

Today they’re not as severe. I still have some nose water. I still feel the itch deep in my right nostril that I’m convinced is the source of all my troubles. But it will pass. At least I don’t have the flu.

For some stupid reason, when I was 12 I decided I wanted to read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It was the summer after sixth grade as I was getting ready to head into junior high, and I was out with a youth tour group in Korea. I was probably anticipating being by myself for the most part, so I guess I wanted a thick obtuse book to keep me company?

I ended up having a lot of fun and didn’t read that much of the book, but one thing that struck me early on was the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg before they headed out to sea.

He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply. “10 – A Bosom Friend.” Moby Dick. Toronto: Bantam, 1981. 57.

Between Ishmael waking up to find Queequeg’s arm around him to this, I was convinced that they had fucked and were in love. I may have masturbated in the bathroom of my room at the Tower Hotel in Seoul to imagining this scene in my head, the overpowering Pacific Islander gruffly manhandling the lithe white man and making him cry in pleasure.

Now that I’m re-reading Moby Dick almost 25 years later, I was struck at how I had the same feeling when reading these prefacing chapters. There is something between the two that I’m not sure was supposed to be quite so explicit in 1851.

It makes me wanna ask, Ishy are you queer?

Last night I went on a Fleetwood Mac/Stevie Nicks rabbit hole that culminated in watching Stevie Nicks – Live at Red Rocks. Can someone explain to me why my faggoty ass was in tears as she closed the show with “Edge of Seventeen”?

Then today I find out about a Fleetwood Mac fest at the Fonda last night. I know Stevie has denied being a witch, but I don’t have any other explanation for this.

Someone posted the above video of Courtney Love singing my favorite Fleetwood Mac song “Silver Springs.” It really is damn near perfection.

I must be sick. There is no other explanation. I was watching the news this afternoon and caught the following report:

So here is a sickening thing, a pubic marriage proposal. I’ve seen billions of these from my time watching live sports events. It’s stupid, cynical and releases a huge photon of bile into my system.

But there I was watching this report and thought, “Wow, I’d like someone to do that for me.” What? What is this parasite in my brain that has taken hostage of my normally sickening response to these things? Are you fucking kidding me. “I’d like someone to do that for me?!!!!!” Really?!!!!

I don’t know what’s wrong, folks. Since I refuse to point fingers at myself, I will blame that bitch Jane Austen.

Peyton Manning is a good ole boy and would never sully his body or his wholesome image by taking HGH. That Al-Jazeera is a turrurist organization who is trying to bring down American values by sullying Peyton Manning’s name. See? Look how angry he is at the report!

See? HGH would never be sent to his house. HOW APPALLING THESE ACCUSATIONS ARE!

Oh wait. Yesterday we found out that Manning’s wife did receive shipments of HGH at their home. And not only that, but Peyton hired a couple of PIs to spook the whistleblower’s parents.

I don’t know nor do I care whether Peyton Manning took HGH. I have always maintained that all performance enhancing substances should be allowed. But the fact that this human Garbage Pail Kid is finally showing is shitty side is thrilling, makes me laugh particularly at all of his adoring fanboys and fangirls. Maybe he can get some comfort by the equally shitty-excuse-of-a-human Papa John.

As for the game on Sunday, Denver should be used to losing big in the big game: in 1990 they lost to the 49ers 55-10. They are going to be down 31-0 by halftime while Cam Newton dances his way to Super Bowl MVP.

I just finished Pride and Prejudice. For it being about 225 pages long. I expected to be done with it by Tuesday, but it took me a bit longer to finish it. I was fine with Jane Austen’s subtle rattling of the cage deftly woven within an insipid tale about husband chasing filled with some annoying characters. I’m looking at you Mrs. Bennet, Lydia, Lady Catherine.

But man, her prose is tough to read. It reminds me of what John Daly would do as host of the classic game show What’s My Line. If the panel asked a question that would be tricky to answer, he would give an obfuscating response. Take the 3:46 mark of the video below:

I had no trouble with Dostoevsky, with Flaubert, with Lawrence or such. But Austen was quite troublesome. Perhaps as each day goes by I’m just getting stupider and stupider.

Also, I agree with Mrs. Sheridan. The most awful things do happen when you marry a Yankee.

On the second page of the Times today is a story about the warring factions among the media at the Syria peace talks in Geneva. It made me giggle that even in a “respectable” journalistic endeavor as war and peace the media can act like babies just as the sports media does.

My only journalistic experience comes in sports, and usually it’s very calm and sedate. On a team’s beat, you see the same people and develop relationships with them. You quickly get a sense of what certain people want. For instance, the tv people want the easy soundbite so we usually let them go first and get out of the way. If certain folks like TJ Simers comes along, then you want to get your question in as quickly as possible before he goes off on one of his cross-examinations (although they can be highly amusing at times.)

But then there are the abnormal days, such as when a scandal erupts or the team is in the playoffs. While fun, those days can be spent trying to jockey for position, talk over people to get your question in, having to use elbows and quite possibly having your cuss-out being aired on live television.

I hated the two times the Vancouver Canucks played the Kings in the playoffs. I really got a sense as to why Canadians hate Vancouverites — they’re whiny, think the whole world is conspiring against them and are just plain cunts. In the hallway outside of the dressing rooms at Staples Center, the CBC crew broadcasting the series in 2010 blocked the middle of the hallway so they can do their on-air postgame interviews. Meanwhile the dressing rooms were opening to the media, and we could not get past the tv crew in order to get to the Kings’ room.

The whole lot of us were grumbling about it to which I just shouted blindly, “Can you guys fucking move?” To be honest, I don’t know if that was aired on CBC, but I didn’t care. Soon thereafter the seas parted, and we were able to get into the Kings’ room albeit tardily and resigned at the back of these scrums.

I’ve been lucky to not have been hit in the noggin by a camera or elbowed away (though I have had to throw some elbows with the Vancouver media.) Other people weren’t quite so fortunate, especially my media sisters. For some unknown reason, they take the brunt of the abuse in these scrums. I just don’t know why. I can’t imagine it!

I guess hearing about the shenanigans at the UN gives me a sense of comfort that it isn’t only sports that is chaotic.

By the way, the above is probably one of the few photos of a media scrum I have taken in my years doing this. Most of the time I was busy doing my job. Also I hated when the Boston Red Sox media came to town. What a bunch of sniveling sanctimonious shitheads.

On Monday I ventured out to Ocean Trails. Since I hadn’t really done much of any opining yet of this upcoming presidential election, I felt the day of the Iowa caucus was a good day to start. So since Trump National is right up against Ocean Trails, I put a curse on him. I would have done it a la Happy Noodle Boy thusly:

But given that this was a selfie taken on my phone and part of the composition required to see a hint of Trump’s golf course, I thought it best to do it this way.

Apparently I was very successful. Trump came in second to Ted Cruz in the caucus, started whining about it today, and that’s probably as much as I know.

The only candidate out of the whole lot whom I can barely stand is Bernie Sanders, but I really loathe and despise his fanboys. I’m halfway rooting for Hillary just to see those cunts start crying.

I don’t mean to say in that title that religion is stupid, although that is certainly what I do believe. I mean to say a religion about fucking. Or perhaps not even an entire religion, but a sect of an already existing religion. Like Sexy Christianity or Lacy Islam or Foxy Buddhism. Where, all apologies to Tori Amos, where if you can make me cum maybe that does make you Jesus.

In today’s LA Times front page, Jonathan Kaiman took a look at the rise of ultra-conservative Salafism in China and how it’s dividing the Muslims in that country. About Salafism:

Salafism is an ultra- conservative school of thought within Sunni Islam, espousing a way of life and prayer that harks back to the 6th century, when Muhammad was alive. Islamic State militants are Salafi, many Saudi Arabian clerics are Salafi, and so are many Chinese Muslims living in Linxia.

Okay. I know those two sentences are trying to infer that Salafism = Terrorism, but I’m all but certain that it is way too simplistic to think about it that way. But the fact that people want to live like a bunch of nomads in 500 AD immediately makes me wary.

What really got me thinking is written several paragraphs later:

“I’ve been studying Muslims in China for the past 30 years, and it’s only over the past four or five that we see young Han men converting to a radical, conservative Islamic ideology,” said Dru Gladney, an expert on Chinese Muslims at Pomona College. “Not politically radical, but radically conservative, radically orthodox.”

This set my wheels in motion. Why are these sects of religion always ultra-conservative and austere? Look at the Pilgrims, the wacko Mormons, the people who actually like Ted Cruz, ISIS, the keep-the-women-away-from-the-prayer-wall Jews. All of them seem afraid of sexuality, afraid of the electrical impulses of the brain to carry on cognitive activity. Yet people flock to them as if denial of pleasure will somehow bring them closer to their god.

I would think that you would want to head into the afterlife full of experiences from this life, fully satisfied that you did everything in this incarnation and that you won’t be a miserable bitter fucking cunt in the next life. Besides, with all the ills that life hurls at you, isn’t fucking a good way to get through the pain?

By the way, that picture above is from a real Romanian Orthodox calendar.