'Bred Crumbs

04:36 PM Wanted to watch the premiere of Kevin Smith's new short film The Flying Car on Wednesday night, but couldn't bear the thought of stomaching the Leno show to do so? Well, that's what the Internet's for; View Askew and News Askew both have a variety of sizes and shapes of downloads of this funny bit, which basks in the trademark Askew vulgarity without using R-rated words. The short shares a typically fanciful discussion between our old Clerks friends while they're stuck in a traffic jam. Think of it as My Drivetime with Dante. And if you choose a small download, don't fret about missing any visual details; remember, this is a Kevin Smith film.

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One of my favorite San Francisco tourist attractions is one most tourists don't know about. Musée Mechanique, tucked into the basement of the Cliff House, on the enticingly rocky bluffs above Ocean Beach, houses ancient video-game predecessors and other relics from the long-gone Playland-at-the-Beach amusement park. The museum -- and especially its moon-shaped fortune teller that my friends and I call the Giant Rice Cake -- utterly charmed me during my first visit here seven years ago and many times since. But now, thanks to National Park Service inattention, it appears doomed. Seems the Service wasn't really too serious about the plan it announced a couple of years ago to give the collection a new home while it repairs the Cliff House. Sad. First the sea lions leave, now this. Soon, there'll be nothing left seeing at Sutro Point except natural beauty and busloads of senior citizens buying cheap San Francisco sweatshirts.

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Police are baffled as to why Guyang Matthew Huang killed Tanya Holzmayer on Wednesday night during a bizarre ambush timed to the delivery of a pizza to her home in a quiet Mountain View neighborhood. He later took his own life.

This true story, as recounted above by the San Francisco Chronicle, fascinates me not because it injects the supposedly staid world of scientific research with soap-opera tragedy. No, what gets me is thinking about the poor delivery guy who was unknowingly used as a pawn so one person he didn't know could kill another. I can't help but wonder how the scars from this will color the rest of his life. First he has this probably crappy job delivering taste-free pizza, and now this. It can't do much for one's outlook. Imagine.

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11:25 AM Oh, if only I had the power of "Daylight Savings Tim" -- an excellent story at McSweeney's.

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10:15 AM

Wow, Amazon has expanded its product offerings more than I realized. (How much do babies usually go for these days, anyway?)

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12:10 AM I rarely notice anymore what a movie's rating (G, PG, etc.) is, but I increasingly notice the MPAA's attached explanations for why a given movie got its rating. I first became enchanted with such information during last year's brief visit to theaters of the film adaptation of Stephen King's Hearts of Atlantis. In commercials for it, the announcer informed us that it was "rated PG-13 for violence and thematic elements." I'm not even sure what "thematic elements" are, much less why grade-schoolers shouldn't experience them.

Then this weekend we got Queen Of The Damned, which is rated R for "vampire violence." One gets the feeling there's some poor schlock in the MPAA ratings office so bored with writing ratings info that he's desperately trying to come up with new phrases.

Viewing the MPAA ratings database reveals more captivating warnings. For example, the upcoming re-release of E.T., even with its dangerous guns and naughty words sanded needlessly away, gets a PG partly because of "mild thematic elements." (Apparently, it's not as thoughtful as Hearts of Atlantis, and therefore less likely to harm the younguns.) The board also somehow found some off-putting "sensuality" in Galaxy Quest. And it just gives up in utter shock at Pink Flamingos, which gets an NC-17 "for a wide range of perversions in explicit detail." Surely John Waters could not be more pleased if he had written the description himself.

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I saw little of the Winter Olympics just past; indeed, I have never cared less about the Games than I did this session. Why?

-- I suspected going in that the Games would be presented here more as Americans on Parade than ever before. Whether this turned out to be true, I can't say, because I didn't watch.
-- Having been pummeled by too many overdramatic and overpackaged NBC Olympics, I couldn't bear even glancing at another one.
-- Manufactured heroes? No thanks.
-- The Winter Olympics consists almost entirely of sports I don't pay any attention to the rest of the year. Why start now?
-- Once again, I could find out results of an event before NBC deigned to televise it, even though it was happening in my time zone.
-- Having one Olympics every two years instead of two every four years has made them seem less special.
-- My enjoyment of the speedskating outfits was tainted by their Nike-ness.
-- I'm still scarred from having to work overnight to edit coverage of the Nagano Games four years ago.
-- I've seen Salt Lake City. Don't need to again.

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This weekend, the Sci-Fi Channel presented something it called Jackie Chan's Metal Mayhem and billed as a Sci-Fi Channel "original movie," raising a number of questions:

-- How is it a Sci-Fi Channel "original" when it has already been released on film and video in its really original Hong Kong version and is already known by three other titles (Tejing xinrenlei 2, Gen-X Cops 2 and Gen-Y Cops)?
-- Why is Jackie Chan's name on it when he had nothing to do with it?
-- And what the hell is actual actor Paul Rudd doing in it?
-- With such a bad dye job?

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