the mother of all yard sales

Alright I made this announcement on Facebook and Twitter, but it needs more coverage so I'm going all archaic and actually posting this.

I am having a yard sale Saturday morning. I want it to be pretty huge, so I want YOU to bring stuff to sell at this thing. We'll mark your stuff with colored stickers and when it sells I'll put the money in an envelope with your name on it. This will be a great chance to get rid of some of your stuff and perhaps make a little dinero. Plus, you'll be doing me a service by making it awesome and big and therefore more people will be drawn to it.

Do it! Bring your stuff to me Friday night (which is tonight I suppose). I'm thinking 9ish. Then we'll start sellin' stuff the next day (probably about 8ish in the morning).

Tell your friends.

living in the geekdom #7

Finally! The results of the poll revealed! You must read Living in the Geekdom #6 to get what's goin' on below.

I doubt this needs any explanation. It is notable for sort of having six panels (at least five). I think all of the other ones have had four.

Wow. I'm hesitating to publish this. It's almost like I don't want to be finished with it. This was a real real fun one.

two quick comments

Forgot to mention that John Hughes actually only directed eight movies. Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful are not on the list. Hughes was kind of like yesterday's Judd Apatow -- with his name everywhere, but actually directing very few movies.

Also, my John Hughes thing is the blog's 400th post! At least it is according to my Blogger dashboard. There may have been a few abortions, so if you go back and count everything, it may be a couple short of 400.

"this party is about to become a historical fact"

I can't believe it.

How old do I feel now? Real old. The guy who made me love being young... died yesterday.

I distinctly remember a childhood of lingering around my teenage brothers and their friends, hoping to catch a few glimpses of the "adult" John Hughes movies they watched. Maybe it was the John Hughes movies that made me idealize teen years as much as I did. Maybe, despite the fact that high school was kind of lame, I never really complained about it because I seemed to suffer in similar ways to the John Hughes characters I grew up with. Maybe, because of all those movies, I never, not even today, figured I'd ever get older than 17.

Anyway, I pretty much want to thank Hughes for the work he did during 1984-1987. He's been silent lately, but he freakin' OWNED '84-'87.

It all started with Sixteen Candles. According to my cinematic trivia genius brother, Hughes wrote and directed this one in order to impress the studio enough to deliver his real baby -- The Breakfast Club. For a buttering-up project, there is no film perfecter. EVERY teen party sequence since has owed itself to the party in Sixteen Candles. Strangely, I've seen few teen comedies to show the humiliation of riding the school bus. Maybe because it couldn't be topped in this one. Of course, this weirdly-rated PG movie was also quite a coming-of-ager for me. I still remember right after the pull-up scene my brother suddenly being like, "Oh, crap. Jon, close your eyes!"

Anyway, Breakfast Club is pretty weird. It was his script that he had to fight the studio to produce, but then you check the imdb trivia and it says that a huge chunk of the emotional parts of the movie was improvised. It makes me wonder what parts he was so anxious to film in advance. It also explains the weirdness of Claire going after Bender at the end after he humiliated her so bad. Of course it wasn't Bender who made Claire cry, it was Judd Nelson who made Molly Ringwald cry.

Pretty in Pink was such an important story to Hughes that he wrote it twice. The second time, was as one of my very favorite movies -- Some Kind of Wonderful. The love triangle sexes were merely switched. The stories were about Andie & Blaine and Keith & Amanda, but all of us viewers were completely and hopelessly attached to Duckie and Watts. Watch 'em. You'll know what I mean. John Hughes' third wheels were very three-dimensional.

Oh, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off! Sheesh! Love. It. Brilliant. I need to watch that again.

I'm sure you've seen this already (it's all over the net right now), but check out this blogger's story about him.

Anyway, bye John. Make some awesome movies for God!

R.I.P. John Hughes (1950-2009)

morbat

Morbat? Wasn't that one of the Decepticons that hung out in Soundwave's chest?

Anyway, many people don't know but I grew my big beard in order to be an extra in the Mormon Battalion movie that's supposed to play in the San Diego Mormon Battalion Visitors' Center. October, I think? We'll road trip it.

Anyway, we were filming the past couple of weeks. For the most part it wasn't very fun... but in hindsight it pretty much was.

Pictures!

lightning pics from like a couple of weeks ago