Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "hella"
¤ Usage: "Hella m'ungry, punchin!"
¤ Origin: Old Valley-Girl speak, or something like that. It was big in the 80s, vanished, and has been reborn largely thanks to Cartman.
¤ Etymology: It's short for "hell of" I suppose, even though no one has ever used that two-word phrase for the purpose that "hella" exists. It's basically a synonym for "very" or "extremely" and is best used to great excess, or for intentionally-annoying sarcastic effect, in much the same way adults can effectively use L33t sP34k.
¤ Notes: An annoying and stupid word, but one you'll soon find yourself almost powerless to cease overusing, if you dare take a verbal step down that mixed metaphor of a road.  Cartman says "hella" about twenty times in an old episode of South Park, driving everyone else crazy, and while it's amazingly annoying to hear him say it... neither Malaya or I can keep from throwing it into conversation when we get a chance.  Mostly to each other, as a sort of "that sounds so stupid it's funny" joke, but we slip up and use it when talking to other people from time to time as well. Much to their horror, I'm sure. -- May 3, 2004

he weekend was hotter than we'd have liked, and we hardly left the house, but it was pretty productive. I wrote for several hours Saturday and Sunday, and even got some exercise, the first I've indulged in since I took a tumble jogging and sprained my left knee. I hadn't had any pain in it for a few days, other than the occasional bursts of agony I get during Malaya's vigorous but therapeutic leg massages, and I've walked around normally for a couple of weeks. So on Saturday evening Malaya and I drove down to the Lafayette Reservoir and walked around it, jogging maybe half a mile over the 2.7 mile circuit.

I went slowly and cautiously, but my knee felt fine the whole time, which was pretty encouraging. I was curious as to how it would be Sunday when I woke up; if that much exercise would make it stiffen up or swell or throb or anything.  It did not, and since Malaya was game, even on her one day off from the gym, we returned to the scene of the crime Sunday night and did another lap, this one with more running.

Amusingly enough, the run vs. walk isn't being set by me, since my knee has felt fine the whole time. It's Malaya who can't run the whole thing yet. Her fitness level has improved a lot with her regular gym workouts, but she's still not to the level she wants to achieve, and as she discovered and relayed to me, there is a big difference between running at the desired heart rate for five minutes on a treadmill, and running around a rather hilly road coarse, out in the sun and wind and bugs. It wasn't quite a "gym muscles" demonstration, since she doesn't do that much treadmill at the gym, preferring to regularly switch off between treadmills and stairmasters and elliptical machines and such. But she was still annoyed to find herself winded after running half a mile at a reasonable pace. Especially since I wasn't winded at all, healing knee or not.

I need the exercise too, since I haven't cut down on my eating for the last four weeks, while I've been unable to run at all, and I've put on a few pounds. And after the winter months, I was heavier than I wanted to be anyway.  I eat a lot more when it's cold, since I'm in the mood to eat then. When it's hot in the summer I hardly eat at all some days, other than celery sticks or carrots or oranges or other cool things. If I'm at all sweaty, I'm too hot to cook, and too hot to eat. Plus in the old days back in San Diego, I was working every other day all summer, running miles up and down steps at the stadium. Hated job or not, it did help keep me fit. Sitting in an office chair in front of a computer for six hours a day typing out the next great fantasy novel is fun, and potentially profitable, but it's hardly a great way to get into shape. Other than couch potato shape.

My knee feels fine tonight, so I might get out and jog some more tomorrow. I don't want to overdo it, but I need to run for about a mile straight before I'm good and sweating and winded, and I figure from that point on I'm really burning fat and building muscle. And Malaya can't keep up with me for that long, at the pace I'd run at. At least not yet.

I'm just happy my knee is back to about 80%. It still hurts sometimes when I turn it a bit while walking, and I can't squat down with it bent double for more than a few seconds before it starts to hurt, and I can't hyperextend it at all without pain (I like to sit with my legs straight out and my heels on a foot stool under my desk. I can do it with my legs crossed and the right one lower than the left, but I can't do them side by side, or right over left.) but it felt fine jogging, even when I detoured to the jungle gym and did a few pull ups, and then ran full speed across the parking lot after Malaya when we were leaving.

And yes, I've been avoiding talking about my injured knee since I figure it's damn boring to read about. But since I got a reader mail over the weekend from a regular reader who said he's bored with the book/movie reviews, and prefers when I talk about my boring life and wondered how my knee was, there you are.  I'll feature some quotes from that and a couple of other recent/interesting emails in the next blog entry, which will likely go online Wednesday. I'm thinking that I'll post a new one every other day for a while, and see how I like that schedule.  More time to write other stuff, two days to store up things worth blogging about.  And despite popular demand, the reviews will continue. Probably as soon as Wednesday, when I want to drop some quick reviews of about half a dozen movies/books I've recently consumed, and have not yet written anything about.

Now here's one news item for the day, before movie discussion and sports blogging discussion and then movie prognosis.

¤ To wrap things up with some humor, (as always, "humor" is defined as "tragedy that happens to other people") here's an article about the latest laughable lies coming out of North Korea. Lies related, as always, to their insane dictator, Kim Jong-il.

Many North Koreans died a "heroic death" after last week's train explosion by running into burning buildings to rescue portraits of leader Kim Jong-il and his father, the North's official media reported on Wednesday. Portraits of Kim and his late father, national founder Kim Il-sung, are mandatory fixtures in every home, office and factory in the hardline communist state of 23 million. All adults are required to wear lapel pins bearing images of one or both Kims.

Last Thursday's blast in the town of Ryongchon, near the Chinese border, killed at least 161 people and injured 1,300, according to international relief agencies. Many of the victims were children. The dead also included workers and teachers who died clutching the portraits of the country's ruling family, said North Korea's official KCNA news agency.

"Many people of the county evacuated portraits before searching after their family members or saving their household goods," KCNA said in a report with a Ryongchon dateline.

"Upon hearing the sound of the heavy explosion on their way home for lunch, Choe Yong-il and Jon Tong-sik, workers of the county procurement shop, ran back to the shop," KCNA said.

"They were buried under the collapsing building to die a heroic death when they were trying to come out with portraits of President Kim Il-sung and leader Kim Jong-il," it said.

Yes, of course they did. Can you imagine how small Kim's dick must be, to fuel a delusional insecurity of such astonishing proportions?

The saddest part is that this news item might not be entirely fictional. But not for any good reason.

The prison diaries of North Korean defectors refer to people imprisoned for accidentally defacing portraits of the Kims.

n Friday's blog I wondered which opening movie, Envy or Godsend, would end up getting worse reviews, after both of them were off to an amazingly bad start. With most of the reviews in, the winner is... us.

Both films were widely ignored and both films flopped miserably in their opening weekends.

• Godsend made a pathetic $6.9m, which is just $2970 per theater, and has just 3 positive and 87 negative reviews.
• Envy made an even worse $6.1m, "good" for $2494 per theater, and received just 2 positive and 68 negative reviews.

Just to put how bad these are into perspective, the new teen flick Mean Girls cleaned up with $25m, and Man on Fire and 13 Going on 30, both in their second week, made much more than any off the other debuts. Hell, the entirely ignored Laws of Attraction, staring replacement Clarice Starling and replacement Roger Moore, made $7m, good for 4th place. The last week in April is traditionally the last chance for studios to dump sub-blockbuster material and try to eek out one decent weekend before the big blockbuster behemoths start lumbering into town. Guess this year was no exception.

A humorous side note; I've lately been reading BlogMaverick.com, a blog updated by Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA tem. He was also a self made multi-billionaire by the age of 30, entirely due to being in the right place at the right time twice during the dot com boom era, and getting his money out of two colossally overvalued stocks before they went bust.  The sad part is that virtually everyone reading this could have been worth $500m inside of 2 years in the last 90s/early 00s, if you'd had $20k to start with, been there at the right time, known which stocks to buy, and when to sell them.  Cuban's just one of the lucky few who was, and he did, and has no parlayed his amazing luck and timing into real money and real investments that can't all go away in a week of bad technology news.

Hell, my dad gave me some IPO tech stocks for my birthday, back in the days that he bought for around $10 each, when they were in the $15 to $20 range. A year later they were going for $50 or more each, and one of them was once over $100 for about two days, before it dropped back down into the $70 range. I wasn't really paying attention to them, I didn't own very many shares of either (though I could have bought hundreds more, if I'd been psychic) and I didn't sell them when they were high.  I finally sold them years later, and got something like $172 for all of the stocks together, after they were worth enough to cover most of a new car, several years earlier.

Anyway, I mention Cuban here because he's the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who just got whipped out of the playoffs in the first round, 4 games to 1, by Sacramento. That series ended on Friday. What opened the day that series closed? Godsend, the first movie he financed part of. Not the best weekend in Mr. Cuban's life, was it?

Still, his blogs about the topics are interesting. His 2004 post mortem Mavericks blog is here, and his tragically optimistic/excited Godsend opening day blog is here. I'll give him some credit about Godsend; he predicted it would make $7m opening weekend, and that was right on track. So at least he wasn't cluelessly thinking it would pull $50m and make him a millionaire again.

But the posts I really enjoy are his inside the NBA ones, where he talks about referee ratings and stats, the business angle of things, etc. His post about the NBA vs. The Olympics is great. As he points out, the Olympics are no longer anything approaching an amateur athletics event. They're a huge global business, one that US networks pay billions to televise, and as such they are in direct competition with other sports. Why on earth is the NBA permitting their best players to go play in it, when it's on another network than the one that's paying the money to the NBA to televise games, and by extension paying the contracts of the players? The Olympics doesn't pay a penny to the NBA for the right to use their best players. What if one of them blows out his knee or breaks an ankle and ruins his career? Is the Olympics going to give the team $50m and a #1 draft pick to cover their loss?  Cuban's suggestion is that the NBA organize a big international tournament, something like the World Cup of soccer, if people want to see which national team is the best.  You may not agree with him and you may love the Olympics, but you have to admit that he's got a good point, and it's not one many people have the balls to make.

The post I most liked though was this one. Moneyball for the NBA. Moneyball is a recent baseball book that goes inside the Oakland A's organization and their revolutionary tactics in player evaluation and development. I'm not going to go into a whole discussion of it here, since if you care you probably know already, and if you don't you don't. Cuban's post talks about ways he'd like to see the NBA change, and stats he thinks would be much more useful to keep than the generally worthless points/assists/rebounds we see now. An excerpt from the post.

Here are the stats I think the Mavs will need to figure out how to collect as a first effort towards determining which have the greatest impact on success:

1. Deflections, Deflections for turnovers
2. Defensive Penetrations Allowed, Defensive Penetrations stopped (did you stop your man from penetrating in the paint before he shot or gave up his dribble)
3. Assists in paint, Assists outside of paint, within each, assists leading to jumpshots, assists leading to layups, assists leading to foulshots, and within each of these, are they part of fastbreak or not.
4. Rebounds in traffic, Rebounds from free throws
5. Shot percentages - location zone of shot, and within each, whether guarded or open
6. Turnovers - forced, unforced, rule violation turnovers by type (traveling, palming, etc.)
7. Touches - How often, where, duration in seconds, conclusion (pass, assist, shot, turnover as a percentage of total touches)
8. Charges taken, blocks given
9. Blocks above head, blocks that were strips, fouls on block attempts by each
10. Turnovers caused - steals, forced by defense (i.e., preventing your man from crossing 8 sec line, or guarding your man for more than x seconds leading to 24 sec clock violation)

This ties in perfectly with my usual "there's no good sports writing for any sport but baseball" rant subject. And since I like reading about baseball but find it unwatchably boring, and I actually enjoy watching basketball (sometimes) I would, in theory, enjoy reading some intelligent writing about it. But aside from the occasional The Sports Guy's ESPN column, and the seemingly-retired AlleyOop.com guy, there ain't much besides the standard "Team X plays much harder on defense than Team Y" bullshit.  Want articles about whoever the writer last had lunch with and how hard he's been working on his jump shot? You're golden. Want articles that indulge in statistical analysis, and why Player X is overrated if you take into account his points per minute and per shot? Good luck.

Basketball digression aside, I was talking about summer movies.

And speaking of big summer movies, I think there are going to be some tremendous flops this year. Skimming the last Entertainment Weekly, with its capsule movie previews, there are like a dozen movies with admitted costs of well over $120m (which means they're actually more like $150m, and that's not even counting the $40m more they'll spend on promotion) and there's no way they're all going to earn it back. True, it's almost impossible to make an unprofitable movie at this point, what with DVD releases costing basically nothing extra, and often earning more than the movie did theatrically, but still, there will be some flops.

The Alamo (remember that?) came out a few weeks ago, and got things started.  It cost over $100m plus another $30m in promotion, and it's earned back just $22m so far, has no overseas box office prospects, and even with DVD it won't make back anything approaching what it cost to make. You sort of wonder how that one got the greenlight, what with westerns almost never making any money, war pictures being out of style, and it commemorating a miserable defeat in US military history. On top of that, there were zero marketable stars, no female characters or a romance to get women to buy tickets, and not enough action or young actors to get teens to go. Now if they'd spent $25m and made it an intense drama about the strain of men in combat, it might have broken even. Instead they made it a huge spectacular and ran ads showing nothing but long shots of lots of fiery cannonballs, and no one went.

What'll be next? I think a great bet is the Hannibal movie Oliver Stone is working on, but it's not coming out until next year. No, not a Silence of the Lambs sequel; Hannibal, the warrior leader who crossed the Alps with elephants. Okay, so maybe some of us have a memory of that much, but really, who thought a hundred million dollar movie about a war chief from 200BC was a good idea? It's not like he's Alexander the Great.

Oh wait, there are two movies coming up about him, both of them costing well over $100m.

This year we've got Troy, with cost well over $100m, and might even make most of that back, thanks to cast chock full of hunky guys and something sort of approaching a love story in the background, even if all you see in the trailers are scenes that look like the desert version of the siege of Helm's Deep.

Silly as the boom in classical warrior movies seems to the rest of us, they'll probably all make decent money, largely due to overseas box office. Movies about ancient history, especially non-American history, will make good money around the world.  The US is by far the largest chunk of the world wide box office, but the rest of the world can do 2 or 3x the US box office, even on mega hits. LotR:Return of the King is the second biggest money earner ever (in inflation-adjusted figures, after Titanic) and so far it's made $376m in the US, and $736m worldwide.

Most movies don't do that well worldwide; Spider-Man made $404m in the US and $418m worldwide, but movies that are mostly of interest in the US, comedies especially, which don't translate well, really need to clean up in the US, since they can't count on much overseas. Elf, for instance, was a smash in the US, making $178m over the holidays. Yet it's only made $47m worldwide, and like 75% of that is from the UK and Australia.  Or you can find more specialized movies, like Bad Santa, that didn't even get an international release, since they're so dependent upon American sensibilities (hatred of over-commercialized mall Xmas bullshit, in that case) that they wouldn't translate very well at all overseas (at least in the judgment of studio executive weasels).

Anyway, my point is that even if a movie flops initially in the US, it might still make a good profit once you count up the international box office, DVD sales, TV rights, etc.  But even with that, it's still possible to make a big budget, big publicity movie that loses a ton of money. As the Alamo proves.

Others coming up later this year that look like iffy bets?

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It's got an awful name, and looks like a weird, silver-toned monster/alien/disaster movie, set in the 30's (I guess), starring monsters/aliens that look like futuristic toys from the 20s. It might be a great movie, but come on, what's the target audience for this thing? Old people with nostalgia for the look of the early 1900s?  Kids who think it's shiny?  The stars are all late 20s or early 30s, so no teens are going to go, it's all computer graphics so old people aren't going to go, and there aren't any stars who can put asses in the seats, so general interest fans aren't going to go. I can't see it making over $30m total, and it cost well over $100, according to the info I've seen.

The Day After Tomorrow. It's directed by a guy a director with no name recognition, the biggest "star" is Dennis Quaid, and the disaster's cause is... global warming.  Whose going to see it? There's no hint of any human elements in the trailers, it's depressing, and it's not an event; it's not like we can root for people trying to stop an asteroid from hitting the earth or something like that. It's just a bunch of pointless eye candy of tornados and other forms of natural destruction eating up major landmarks. It reminds me of my blog/rant about that subject in the past: if there's ever a disaster coming at the earth, get the hell away from the Statue of Liberty, The Eiffel Tower, The Sydney Opera House, The Golden Gate Bridge, etc. Those landmarks draw disasters like trailer parks attract tornados.

The Chronicles of Riddick.  This one is a bit easy to point out, given that Vin Diesel hasn't had a hit since his first hit, but it looks like a movie about a famous and much-loved SciFi novel with a huge star in the adaptation. Except that it's not based on any existing story that anyone's read, and it doesn't have any big stars. I want to see it since I like spectacle and action scenes and scifi stuff in movies, but I don't know about this one spurring enough traffic to make back the $150m they've sunk into it.

King Arthur: The subject has been beaten to death, the trailer sucks mostly due to Mr. Voice overexplaining everything, it looks like Gladiator 2: Scotland, everyone is sick of shots of flaming arrows arching towards a castle under siege, and there aren't any marketable stars. It'll probably make money anyway, worldwide at least, and Malaya wants to see it. Bleh.

Catwoman: It's a $45m movie that somehow cost $120m, Sharon Stone hasn't sold a ticket since her vagina co-starred in Basic Instinct, Halle Berry is pretty but no one buys tickets to see women with short hair, all the geeks hate the plot of this one, the comic book movie boom is about over, and it's got astonishingly poor buzz, mostly due to the near-universal hatred of Halle's biker slut catwoman suit. Still, any comic book with a chick in a tight suit can almost guarantee success, if Daredevil is any barometer, since guys like comic book action movies, and girls will go if there's a girl in the movie and some romance.  Never underestimate the earning potential of a 90 minute action flick with some romance.

I could go on and make my predictions for big summer hits, based on total box office as well as international and money vs. cost, but I've gone on long enough, and I'm not about to do the research necessary to have informed opinions on these issues anyway.  Yes, I know, what the hell am I doing... proud owner of a blog, on the actual Internet, withholding comment due to lack of information. Let's hope this doesn't start a trend or anything.

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