"Big Man Japan"

Holy crap, this movie sounds like the awesomest thing ever. The official synopsis:

A middle-aged slacker living in a rundown, graffiti-ridden slum, Daisato’s job involves being shocked by bolts of electricity that transform him into a stocky, stick-wielding giant several stories high who is entrusted with defending Japan from a host of bizarre monsters. But while his predecessors were national heroes, he is a pariah among the citizens he protects, who bitterly complain about the noise and destruction of property he causes. And Daisato has his own problems –an agent insistent on branding him with sponsor advertisements, an Alzheimer-afflicted grandfather who transforms into a giant in dirty underwear, and a family who is embarrassed by his often cowardly exploits. A wickedly deadpan spin on the giant Japanese superhero, BIG MAN JAPAN is an outrageous portrait of a pathetic but truly unique hero.

Official website/trailer
"The Strangling Monster" clip
The Stink Monster" clip

Puzzle From Hell

Someone gave us this puzzle for Christmas. Now, before you read any further, follow that link. Looks like a perfectly ordinary puzzle, apart from the funky shape, right?

Here's what makes this particular puzzle a form of torture:

• There is no indication whatsoever on the box that it is a shaped puzzle. Looking at the packaging, it appears to be an ordinary rectangular puzzle. It's hard to start by finding the edge pieces when the box art lies to you about what shape the edge actually is.
  
• The pieces fit together very loosely. We semi-jokingly said that the easiest way to tell if two pieces were a fit was if they fell apart when you touched them. When it's all done, there is a full inch of play across the entire puzzle - you can squeeze the pieces together and stretch them apart by a full inch. I measured.
  
• The title, "Snowy Trees", is a misnomer. It should be called "Snowy Tree", because whoever created the picture only bothered to paint one tree, and then used Photoshop to copy and paste that tree everywhere else. Oh, sure, he transformed some of them a little: One of them is squished down really squat and wide, another is stretched out tall and skinny; one is flipped to a mirror image of the rest of them. But it's the same goddamned tree, over and over.
  

We didn't let it beat us, though:

What the Hell?

Is it just me, or does this article summary from the front page of CNN.com sound more like an Onion story?

No good way to tell kids they have cancer
When her mom and dad called her into the den, 9-year-old Gigi Pasley thought they were going to tell her a big surprise, "a good surprise" she said. Instead, they told Gigi she had cancer. "She burst out with this awful sound, a moan, a scream of complete and utter agony," said her mother, Jessica Pasley. The Pasleys learned that day there's no good way to tell your child she has cancer. full story

Gimme gimme gimme

My Amazon.com wish list:

Review

Juno - Not bad. Mostly, it works. It does try too hard to be hip &mdash seriously, you actually wrote a character saying the line, "Honest to blog?" And isn't that song Juno and Bleeker play together at the end awfully contempo-indie-folk for someone who spends the rest of the film talking about Iggy and the Stooges and the 1977 punk explosion? But, on the trying-too-hard-to-be-hip, aggressively-quirky score, it's nowhere near as bad as Napoleon Dynamite, so there's that. The always-watchable J. K. Simmons does good work as Juno's dad. Overall, worth seeing once, anyway.

Well, That Didn't Take Long

Her name, we think, is Binky:


I say "we think", because when we got her at the Milwaukee Humane Society, they said her name was "Monty", but since rabbits tend to be difficult to sex when they're young, we suspect someone probably told her original owners she was male. So she needs a new name, and she's been shy about letting us know what it should be, but "Binky" seems to be the one that's sticking most.

She and Buster seemed to hit it off pretty well when we took him to the Humane Society to meet her, but there have been some altercations since we got her home. They're currently in separate (but adjacent) cages, and we're taking it slow with supervised play dates.

Oh, and this guy was there, too. His name is Babyface Joe, apparently:


Well, we had been watching Verminators, and it kept making me want another pet rat to keep in my computer room, so he can sit on my shoulder while I'm up here. Yeah, I'm a little strange.

RIP, Suzi

She passed away some time last Sunday night.