Tuesday various

Monday various

In which I resort to reposting my Twitter feed

I don’t know what you did today, but me, I spent way too much time making up “facts” about the new Robert Rodriguez movie Machete.

You could probably argue that any time spent doing this is too much time, but every man needs his hobbies.

It all started when Joe Hill posted the following on Twiter this morning:

Robert De Niro has twice won the Oscar. By coincidence, Danny Trejo cut a guy named Oscar in jail, a couple times.

He appended the hashtag #factsaboutmachete, and I decided to just run with it.

Anyway, here are the so-called facts I posted about the ex-Federale-goes-on-brutal-rampage-of-revenge movie:

Based on the novel of the same name by Jane Austen.

“The feel-good musical of the year!” raves Gene Shalit.

A spin-off of Hans Christian Andersen’s heartwarming holiday classic “The Little Machete Girl.”

Audiences will have to wait until the director’s cut to see Danny Trejo have sex in 3D with blue aliens.

Ever the Method actor, Robert De Niro served eighteen months in Congress to prepare for his role as Senator McLaughlin.

Machete was actually the name of his sled.

“Whosoever pulleth the machete from the stone shall be king,” proclaims a possibly inebriated Cheech Marin.

Follows in a long tradition of characters named for deadly weapons: Bullitt, Blade, Celine Dion…

Legend has it that to every age, a new Machete is born. Frankly, though, I don’t what Legend has been smoking.

In Japanese, Machete is known as Happy Sunshine Sharp Pointy Man.

An origin story in which Danny Trejo’s character is bitten by a radioactive machete was scripted but never filmed.

Be sure to stay through the end credits for a thrilling sneak peek at Machete joining the Avengers!

If you stand in front of a mirror and shout Machete! three times, Robert De Niro’s character will appear and deport you.

Machete’s blades may not be crafted from adamantium, but they still put the fear of god into that gringo Magneto.

The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Machete from the bosom of the water…

A shocking twist in Martha’s Vineyard reveals Trejo to be Kyle Machete, formerly of the Kennebunkport Machete family.

A few other people got into the action, too. I particularly liked this from RichterCa:

Originally planned to be the next “Spy Kids” sequel, it was rebranded after children in test audiences cried for hours.

And this from TwittterRock:

He takes just like a Machete. And he aches just like a Machete. But he breaks just like a little girl.

Amazingly, I actually also managed to get a fair amount of work done, too. Today marked the last of my long summer-hour days. I have a half day tomorrow — provided Hurricane Earl doesn’t change those plans — and then I’m off until a week from Monday.

Maybe I’ll even go see Machete while I’m home…

The Twentieth

The day got off to kind of a weird start when I logged on to Twitter under my Kaleidotrope account and tried to follow somebody, an editor whose work I admire and respect, and discovered that this person had preemptively blocked me. Well that’s strange, I thought, but there it was at the top of the screen: “You have been blocked from following this account at the request of the user.” We’ve never had any run-ins that I’m aware of, and I hope it’s just an accident or a misunderstanding. I’m disappointed that I’m blocked from seeing this person’s updates, but worried that the Kaleidotrope account is coming across as some kind of spammer. I honestly don’t update it as often as my personal account.

But, nothing really to be done about it, so I put it out of my mind and went to work. And of course, the half day on Friday turned out to be my busiest day of the whole week. I had corrections to make and reviews to solicit and a couple of other tasks I wanted to complete, and luckily I managed to do so just as the one o’clock hour was drawing near. I got home around 2:30, spent some time playing with the dog and watching this week’s episode of Top Chef, and generally just remembering why it’s more fun to hang out in the backyard with my iPad than in my cubicle at work.

Then this evening, I went to the mall and bought eyeglasses. I have the prescription, and while I didn’t get as good a deal as I might have at the eyeglasses factory outlet, I wound up with a decent price and what I hope are a nice pair of frames. I should have them in 7-10 days, so we’ll see I like them as much then.

And that’s really it. More than anything, I’m just shocked it’s already the 20th of August. Where does the time go?

No Pickle Thursday

So I got a tuna fish sandwich for lunch today, and they asked if I wanted pickles when I was paying for it. I said yes, because, hey, free pickles. But when I got back to the office, there were no pickles to be found in my bag. And because this is the kind of thing that makes the internet go round, I posted it to Twitter. This is what resulted:

Pickles

It got a surprising amount of response over on my Facebook page, too, which is basically just a feed of my Twitter posts I maintain so I can play Scrabble online. Usually I have to post really pedantic grammatical questions to get that kind of response. (Although, in my line of work, that kind of thing comes up a whole lot more often than lack of pickles.)

Anyway, it kept me amused. Today was decent enough for a Thursday, although it was disgustingly hot and muggy, and I’m just glad tomorrow’s a half day.