Hey Everyone

This is a note to all of my loyal readers. Please help spread the insanity! Tell your friends to check me out and comment on some of my entries. Who knows, maybe we'll start something great. Some sort of cheesy grass roots movement or some such clap trap. And for today only a big shout out goes to Miss Ethel for having the guts to see how I was doing and where I am with my life. You go girl and give the man hell for me! Participate in my polls and I'll get to see what y'all are thinking.

Keep Smilin' and hell will freeze over soon!

Bye!

Proper English

I really cannot stand when people do not use proper English when speaking or writing. It causes the person who is speaking to sound completely ignorant and I automatically want to deduct about 15 IQ points. I understand that in some cases using improper English can and should be used for dramatic effect or is a matter of local dialect, but words should be used with their proper meaning, association, and order.
An example of this is people who include themselves at the beginning of a list of people rather than at the end. "Me, John, and Juan went to the concert." It should always be John, Juan, and I went to the concert." A person should always include themselves last in these situations, but hardly anyone every does this anymore!!
A second example that truly irks me is the use of the double negative in a sentence. "I don't got no money." First of all, "got" should not be used in this sentence or in any sentence where the proper word is have. This statement should always be "I do not have any money."
I realize that I may be guilty of these grammar mistakes on occasion, but if people really make a conscious effort to speak properly foreign visitors would not automatically assume that America is populated by idiots who cannot speak their own language, let alone a foreign one.

John Wayne

John Wayne movies are a great way to kill an afternoon. In fact instead of watching the Super Bowl along with the other 93 million people in television universe, I curled up, did my homework, and watched John Wayne star in both Rio Bravo and El Dorado. Sure the movies are similar, but they still are better than any other western I've seen in the last five years. They just don't make 'em like they use to. Filmed in 1963, Rio Bravo is a block buster of sorts with John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, and that crazy character actor from the Real McCoys, I think his name was Walter Brennan. The story is sort of formula with the sherrif holding the brother of a powerful ranch owner for murder and the brother trying to get him out, so he bottles up the whole town and scares or murders every one who would help the Sherrif (John Wayne) out except for the town drunk and former deputy (Martin), a crazy old cripple who has lost his land to the bad guys (Brennan), and a green gunslinger who has a funny way of choosing what is and isn't his business (Nelson). As always, Wayne gets his man, or men, in the end, with an explosive ending, literally. Wayne and Brennan, along with Martin, chuck dynamite at the warehouse and shoot at it in order to get them to surrender.
Eldorado, filmed some time in the late sixties or very early seventies, feature's John Wayne, Robert Mitchem, and James Caan as the principle characters, with Ed Asner as the evil, land grabbing Bart Jason. This story is a bit of a twist to Rio Bravo. This time Wayne plays a gunslinger with a conscience, Cole Thorton, who refuses to help Jason steal the ranch of a hard working family, the MacDonalds. In the mean time, he manages to accidentally kill MacDonald's youngest son, and is then shot by the boy's only sister. He lives (mostly because he's John Wayne) and leaves town to forget. He meets up with a green kid, not unlike Nelson character( Colorado), named Allan Badillian Trauhern, otherwise called Mississippi, played by James Caan. Caan whelds a knife like a Barbary Coast pirate, but he can't fire a gun to save his life. Well he can fire it, he just can't hit the broad side of a barn. Any way, while Wayne is gone the sherrif, J.P. Harra (Mitchem) becomes a drunk just like Martin's character, and is only attend to by a noisy former indian fighter named Bull, who is comparable to Brennan's character of Stumpy. Crazy things and senerios occur, like in Rio Bravo, ending in a gun battle much like Rio Bravo, but without the dynamite.
These movies are great little movies, for all that they are so similar formula stories. I know people say that John Wayne is a old flat actor, but if you watch his movies closely, you can really see the work he put into each character, especially ones like Cole Thorton and Rooster Cogburn, U.S. Marshall.

Valentines Day

Right now everyone seems to be so involved in Valentine's Day. Commercials treat it like it's christmas all over again, and there is every concievable kind of candy available in little heart shaped packages. I don't understand how buying someone a fifty pound box of chocolates is going to say "I Love You". To me saying "I Love You" is doing something you ordinarily wouldn't do, like watching your significant other's favorite movie even if you hate it, eating at thier favorite resturant even if you don't really care for the food, watching that person's favorite sport even if it bores the pants off of you, or even just remembering something about that person that they think you have forgotten. Saying you love some one doesn't have to be a shopping spree, it's just three little words backed up by corresponding actions. Chocolate is nice, but I would rather my loved one hold me close, tell me how much they love me, and spend Valentine's Day remembering all the good memories and events that we have shared together. My point is: Love doesn't have to be expensive, it just has to be meaningful.

When it rains, it pours

Have you every noticed that when you desparetly need something to happen, it doesn't, but when you don't need it anymore, you recieve too much of it. This seems to be the case with me and jobs. When I really need one, no one wants to hire me, but when I finally break down and settle for any position that brings in an income I am suddenly Miss Popularity. I took a job that I really didn't want, in a field that I have valuable experience, now I have at least three other job offers to consider, and an aplication in for one of the jobs of my dreams. If my luck, or bad luck as the case may be, holds I just might wind up doing what I always wanted to do even before I graduate from college in the fall. What I don't understand is that in order for me to be a fortunate individual in the job market, I have to already have a job that I really don't want or need. Life is strange.