Well, dear readers, you know how sometimes you have a bad hair day? Well, yesterday I did not have a bad hair day, I had a bad food day. I’m not sure how that happens, but it’s happened too many times recently, and I take umbrage, I tell you, I take umbrage. Whatever I attempted to eat yesterday was bad. Really bad. I’d gone to Gelson’s and got some food from the hot food bar – a couple of cheese enchiladas and their rigatoni with meat sauce, along with a small chicken Caesar salad from the Wolfgang Puck bar. The first thing I ate was the rigatoni with meat sauce. That was okay – not great, but okay – only about three ounces, though. Then I began eating the cheese enchiladas. They’d apparently been sitting there for hours, and they were gross beyond repair and beyond repair gross. I mean, really gross. Dry, disgusting, and weird. I tried heating them in the microwave – it didn’t help. So, I only had about three bites of that before throwing it in the trash. I moved on to the Wolfgang Puck chicken Caesar salad. I used to enjoy it, but something about it has changed and not for the better. I ate it but christened it the Wolfgang Puke chicken Caesar salad. So, later, in the early evening, I ordered McDonald’s – a filet-o-fish with extra tartar sauce and the deluxe quarter pounder, no mayo. It arrived pretty quickly. Even though the receipt clearly said extra tartar sauce, there was barely any on the sandwich. The entire POINT of the sandwich is the tartar sauce. Without the tartar sauce, it’s like eating a breaded eraser without flavor. At that point, I simply wanted to vomit on the ground, but I moved on to the deluxe quarter pounder, no mayo. The good news is there was no mayo. The bad news is that it was disgusting. It came from the nearby McDonald’s, which is just no good. When I’ve ordered after hours they use the Encino McDonald’s and that one is very good. At that point, I realized it was simply a bad food day and nothing I did, nothing I ate, would change that fact and I’d eaten enough. And so, I am sitting here like so much nauseous fish without tartar sauce, writing these here notes and in need of a good food day, which will hopefully be today. I’m now listening to Alexander Gauk do the Shostakovich sixth – the best performance of that symphony that I’ve heard. I don’t think the sixth is that well thought of but I like it and it’s quite short at twenty-nine minutes. All these Gauk performances of Shostakovich are on the Tube of You, if you feel like checking them out.
Prior to that, I watched a motion picture entitled Eraser, one of those lame, preposterous action thrillers starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with James Caan and Vanessa Williams. It’s so predictable at every turn that you feel you’ve already seen the film – I hadn’t, but there wasn’t a single moment where I didn’t know exactly what would happen in terms of the villain, the dialogue, the shots, and the action. The stuff with the 1996 computers was quaint and amusing, as were the cell phones the size of a shoe. Miss Williams has no personality or spunk; therefore, her role doesn’t work at all. Arnold works in the witness protection program and is the best at “erasing” people so that there is no trace of them. It doesn’t help the Chuck Russell is a terrible director. And yet, like most of this tripe, it was a hit. In fact, that decade produced many such hideous films. And yet, it had its own sort of kitsch factor and I kept watching just to see how much more preposterous it could be and in that regard it never disappointed. James Coburn is wasted, and the only fun performances come from a group of Eyetalian actors playing mafia types, all of whom would go on to appear on The Sopranos. Also, in small roles, pre-Mad Men John Slattery, and pre-Babe (that film was shot after this but released before, I think) James Cromwell (really, just a one-scene bit). There is a most amusing scene in a drag club. Roger Ebert gave it three of four stars – that’s when we all knew Ebert had lost his mind as a critic.
Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, I’ll see if I’m feeling up to shooting the Indiegogo video, I’ll damn well have a good food day, and then I’ll tune in right here at haineshisway.com for all things Tony Awards. I have no way of watching them, unless I do some kind of trial period with some streaming thing, which I don’t care to do, so hopefully you’ll all be watching, and we can have reports all during the broadcast.
This coming week is very busy – getting the Indiegogo campaign ready to launch as soon as we have an edited video, all sorts of meetings and meals, and working on a potential new web series I’m thinking about.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up when I’m up, maybe shoot the Indiegogo video, have a good food day, and then get the Tony Award reports. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, hoping to have no more bad food days.