If you don’t know who Troy Bolton and Gabriella Montez are, then you obviously don’t have chiildren in Elementary through High school. They are the star-crossed sweethearts of the Disney Channel’s HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL, the most popular movie on the Disney channel ever, and a movie my daughter and her friends must have watched on TV and DVD ten hundred million thousand times, not counting today when they’ll probably watch it another twenty hundred thousand times. Meaning that my Wife and I have probably had this movie or the soundtrack playing through the background of our regular parental chores at least that many times. And I have to say, even after all that exposure, that’s it’s actually a pretty good movie! Why?

• It’s a good story. Troy is a star basketball player, Gabriella is a star science student, but what they both want to do is sing sing sing! The supporting characters are very funny, especially the Drama teacher Ms. Darbus and Sharpey’s brother Ryan.
• The music is undeniably catchy and well written. And, most interestingly for me, the signature song “What I’ve Been Looking For”, is presented in two drastically different versions — the poppy, show-tuney version by Sharpey and her brother, and the soulful, pretty way by Troy and Gabriella. And it’s my hope that the kids who watch this will learn a litle bit about songs and arrangements and dynamics (that is, when they’re not swooning and dancing…)
• And speaking of dancing — the TV show goes out of its way to present excerpts so kids can actually learn the dance moves in the movie, which is just great, because a) it’s fun to watch your kids learn dance moves, b) it’s good exercise, and c) see Item A.
Lastly, of course, is that’s it’s a “safe” kids movie about high school – there are no guns, drugs, hooking up, etc. If you want that, go see STRANGERS WITH CANDY, or HARD CANDY, or The Ramones in ROCK AND ROCK HIGH SCHOOL (which I’ll show my daughter when she gets a little older…)

Now I’m sure there’s some people who will read this and want to talk about the commercialization of children’s television, the shallowness of contemporary culture, why aren’t kids watching THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, etc. And to them I say – Troy and Gabriella! 4-Ever!

-{ Hanttula.com }- -{ Presents: The Museum of Food Anomalies™ }-

This year I made a pretty simple and straightforward New Year’s resolution. I wasn’t going to lose 20 pounds (still between 180-185, depending on whether or not I had dessert last night), and I wasn’t going the Austin Powers route (“Have sex with Japanese twins“). Nope. My resolution: Try to do something nice for someone else every day.

So that’s what I’ve been trying to do. I’m not stopping world hunger, or curing cancer, or adopting children from Namibia like certain other people named Brad. I’m just trying to spread around some good karma. So I’m been doing stuff like – letting Cadillac Escalades merge into my lane on the Southfield Expressway even though we all know the left hand lane has been closed for three months and they were just speeding to get there 20 seconds faster; picking up lunch at the Arabic bakery for people at work; buying a book about the making of THE KINKS ARE THE VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY for my buddy who is a big Kinks fan (though he doesn’t know I got this for him yet, so mum’s the word); helping a friend from the PTA install software. None of this stuff is any big deal and I won’t be getting any awards for this stuff, and it’s not supposed to. The idea is to do something for someone that isn’t me and to make the world an incrementally happier place. It stops you thinking about yourself and makes the world go around a bit smoother. And it’s definitely working better than last year’s resolution to get Lindsay Lohan to eat some more and get those awesome curves back.

But next year, Wife permitting – definitely the twins.

Hey–I am the first to say the iPod is an awesome, awesome thing. All the music I want in one easy place, easily transportable to the car, the office, the hotel. Great form factor, able to hold literally thousands of my favorite songs, new and interesting songs I may have read about, songs floating around on the net, songs I wrote myself for my old bands that and converted to MP3s for fun. And yet.. And yet..

Let me confess: Sometimes — no make that “Occassionally” …no wait, make that “Rather often”, no, strike that.. Let’s just be honest and say “All the time…” Anyway, all the time, if I’m in the car, and I’m listening to some popular new thing that’s supposed to be the bees knees, like, say, the new Gnarls Barkley record, and it doesn’t immediately hit me over the head, well then…Pop to the next song. Or, more likely, a totally different CD. Or I just hit “random” and end up listening to “Dance Little Sister” for the zillionth time…

In the “old days”, you got a record, and you put it on the turntable, and you looked at the cover, and you cleaned your pot… Then with the CD, you put it in the player, looked at the tiny boklet and paged through that. Now, with MP3, all you do is…listen. And those really good old records, well, to be honest, they didn’t sound all that great at first. They took some getting used to. You would listen and try to figure out what was going on. But now, with six thousand other songs to choose from…

It’s like this: You have a fight with your girlfriend. Do you think about it, try to go through the difficult business of talking and discussing and debating and understanding.. Or do you just…talk to the next pretty new young girl standing right next to her? The other girl, she’s standing right there. Your girlfriend doesn’t care. It’s totally up to you. I mean, how much self control do you have? Life is short–even if you didn’t have pancreatic cancer like Steve Jobs. Why not enjoy yourself, if only for three minutes of bliss?

My iPod has turned me into a whore.

There are so many reasons to hate Paul Simon, it’s really hard to know where to start. Just off the top of my head:

1) He wrote all those songs on SIMON AND GARFUNKEL’S GREATEST HITS that every white high school kid/college freshman has memorized, including myself, most of which are full of “deep” thoughts and bombast (especially “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, which I’m afraid I’ve never cared for despite it being so meaningful and all), though they did do the excellent “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme” (By Trad Arr, one of my favorite songwriters of all time) and “Mrs. Robinson”. (For more research, please see The Coolie’s DIG, which covers all the S&F hits in many different styles, the best of which, in this writer’s humble opinion. is the heavy metal “I Am A Rock”)

2) Just about every interview you read with this guy is incredibly self-involved and pompous. (In which he is similar to other New York Jewish intellectuals like Lou Reed, except for the fact that Lou wrote “Heroin” and P.S. wrote “Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard”). I for one am glad Capeman tanked on Broadway.

3) His whole “refreshing the fount of my genius by plumbing the depths of multicultural music that could really be successful if it just had that Paul Simon touch”, be it zydeco, New Orleans jazz, African music, etc. and wouldn’t it be a good idea if P.S. kept the copyright and royalties? (Which reminds me of Peter Cook’s comment that Ginger Baker was his his favorite member of Cream, because he “went to the Africa to teach the natives to play the drums.”)

4) He was married to Carrie Fisher for a while when she was still spectacularly hot, thereby leaving her unable to return my phone calls.

5) He played L.A. sleaze Tony Lacey in ANNIE HALL, and took Diane Keaton away from Woody. (Though he did hire Lou Reed to play a sleazy record executive in his own movie vanity project ONE TRICK PONY.)

On the other hand, there a few good reasons to think Paul Simon is an excellent singer/songwriter. Such as:

1) He had a hit song that used the word “misconstrued”

2) He wrote “You Can Call Me Al”, which is “profound” in the way those S&F songs never could be, especially with the “angels in the architecture” stuff

3) He has an excellent gift for melody, as evidenced by his gorgeously pretty “Slip Slidin’ Away”, which, even if it is a “woe is me in middle age” songs, is certainly one of the best of its type, in that’s 70’s style Stephen Bishop “On and On” vein

4) He wrote “Kodachrome”, which says “My lack of education hasn’t hurt me none”, which I sing all the time in the shower

5) He took Edie Brickell out of circulation, even though she’s what, half his age? And for that we can all be thankful…

6) He dressed up like a turkey on Saturday Night Live

Last week my daughter wrote a book while hanging out with her Mom, who was giving exams the last week of school. I happen to think this book is frickin’ awesome!. Hopefully you’ll enoy it as well. Click here to download the book as a PDF. (If you can’t read PDF files, go get Adobe Acrobat.) Enjoy! And remember…you knew her when!

Your personality analysis based on this drawing:

You are a suspicious person and have some paranoid tendencies.
You think you are very intelligent.
You are sometimes an aggressive person.
You are sometimes a shy person.
You sometimes feel powerless.
You have an agressive personality.
You are a needy person.

You can see more here.

Washin’ the car. Paintin’ the playhouse. Relaxin’ in the pool. It must be summer. Check out the Gallery here.

And a tip ‘o’ the hat to Google’s Picasa, which not only makes transferring digital pix easy, but now has an on-line web gallery thingie that couldn’t be easier. And it’s got the baragin price of …totally free! Check it out!

OK. Like everybody my age, I watched SNL when it first started and was “cutting edge” (me alone in the den with a big bag of Doritos and a 2-liter 7-Up), and I watched it when it got really popular (when I moved to Michigan with my then girlfriend and my now brother-in-law in his then-girlfriend’s house while her Mom mixed highballs), and I sort of kept up with in college and the beginning of my so-called real-life throughout Eddie Murphy, Charlie Rocket, the endless cast changes, etc. I read the SNL Oral History, which was excellent and totally fascinating, and, now in the era of TiVo, I must admit I actually tape it every week.

Why? That’s a good question. It’s not actually that funny. In fact, these days, it is rarely funny at all, which is why I’m grateful for the fast-forward button on my TiVo. Is is for the nostalgia? Not really. Why then? Well–it’s topical. You learn a lot about what’s going on in popular culture, something I mostly ignore these days, from what they are making fun of. I guess you could say I watch it as a prism to what is going on these days — in comedy, in popular culture, in comparison to the history of the world and the show as I know it. For instance (and I suppose this is no surprise), there’s a lot less political humour than 30 years ago, and the political humour is not that cutting, and, when it is cutting, well–nobody laughs anymore. I guess that says a lot right there.

From a grown-up, technical angle, I guess I’m still impressed by the mere fact that they come up with a 90-minute show, done live, every week or so. That’s a lot of work, and a lot of anxiety (there’s tons of stuff about this in the SNL history book). And though it’s true most of it isn’t funny, and doesn’t connect, relies too much on “characters”, etc. Well, I honestly would say–could you do this? (And I would honestly answer No, but then, I’m not paid to do it, don’t hunger to be a writer or cast member, etc. And I recommend other excellent topical shows like THE DAILY SHOW, THE COLBERT REPORT, old KIDS IN THE HALL re-runs, etc–but I digress…)

This year, surprisingly, the show has been more good than bad. Really! They had a big media spike for a funny rap video. They had comedian Dane Cook on, who really went for broke (as opposed to the usual celebrity walk-ons reading cue-cards). Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were on doing their cool-as-a-cucumber best. It was like the best year in years! Anyway–a few weeks ago SNL had Julia Louis Dreyfus as guest host, and the show was SPOT ON. I mean, it was running on all cylinders–it was funny, it was strange, it was topical AND made you laugh. It just went for it. And some nice guy captured the best skits from the show, and if you want to see why I still watch, check out this rather large (60 meg) clip. And watch for the final “Charades” skit, featuring the amazing Amy Poehler, definitely the best cast member they’ve had since the days of Will Ferrell and Phil Hartman. And when the show comes back again next year (as it always seems to do, like a bad penny)–check it out!

So I’m driving my daughter to her Grandma’s today, and I needs some gas for the Bohemoth, and there’s this car ahead of us in line, and they’re taking like, forever, and then the guy gets out of his car after getting something, and I look at him and I’m suddenly hit by a flash of recognition–he’s me!

Short haircut? Check. Land’s End shirt and Dress Pants? Check. Cell phone clipped on belt? Check. Somewhat in shape (or at least not embarassingly out of shape)? Check. SUV? Check. UM Bumper sticker? Check (sort of–I went there, anyway… Now I can’t afford the bumper stickers!) Then he strolls into the gas station to get a coffee–just like me! (excepting the fact that I would not be caught dead with a cup of gas station coffee, nor would I make a fellow human being wait 5 minutes in line for gas at 7:25 in the morning when he’s trying to get his daughter to her Grandma’s and then has to get back into car and drive to work).

But anyway — It struck me. I’m just like everybody else.

Ah, well. I guess it could be worse. I could be just like The Unabomber.