bigtiny sez....

What is it about John Wayne? Big, craggy, always the same character, and most films are pretty mediocre (if not worse) from a film critics perspective. Politically the guy was just to the right of Attilla the Hun.....but you know, I LOVE John Wayne movies! I don't know why....there's something about his character portrayal that resonates. Maybe it's because I come from a southern family and upbringing. Some of the attitudes and behaviors from great Wayne films were observed in houses in which I was raised. Maybe it's the larger than life story telling, another staple of my upbringing. My folks could tell stories about events in their lives and stretch them for hours, eliciting comments like "yes....I knew Aunt Mabel was an official Ninja...I saw the paper that says so...." or "you know uncle Waldo once kicked Patton's ass in a bar fight, right? Not only that, but when Omar Bradley started to stick his nose into it, he got a taste of the Florsheims too...

I stopped off at 7-11 on the way home to pick up some bread, milk and a helicopter. Just as I was putting the key in the front door the typically flimsy bag broke, sending milk, bread slices, and aviation parts clattering across the front porch. I need a vacation!

While I was at the theater the other night, the now common string of commercials was playing before the feature started. I HATE this, but there's nothing I can do about it. The last commercial was for a mall franchise called 'Build a Bear'. The commercial left me wide mouthed and speechless. It took me several minutes to realize that it was actually a commercial not some subversive Fellini-esque parody of a commercial. I hate...no I FUCKING HATE malls and all of the stupid franchises that have been invented as part of the burgeoning mall culture in this country. A bunch of bored, ignorant shit heads walking around a manufactured utopia of over priced stores buying shit that they don't need from companies who only want to get their money......it makes me want to puke. But I digress. I just wanted to convey how much I hate the mentality of the people who think up these concept stores for the mall culture...and that's part of what left me speechless after seeing this c...

When I was a kid, here was nothing l loved to hear more on a spring or summer afternoon than "we're going to the drive in tonight!" I LOVED the drive-in. Sitting in the family car, or later in my high school beater, eating home popped popcorn out of brown paper shopping bags and cracking the old cooler for a cold Dr. Pepper, while watching my favorite movie stars a 40x80 FOOT movie screen...it was excellent! When we were really young we'd actually get into our PJs before we left the house so that we could just sleep in the car....then get carried into the house without rousing...what a life! I remember sneaking out of my grandparent's house when I was 10 to go sit on the fence of the drive-in that was next door to their neighborhood and watch 'Bonnie and Clyde'. I couldn't have even gotten in to see it at that age, but there it was, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway (Faye Dunaway!!!) 40 feet high and blasting their way through anybody that got in their wa...

I was coming up out of the subway today and I noticed a young woman coming down the escalator with a GINORMOUS 'hand' bag. This thing was made out of leather, was about 3 times as big as she was, was so heavy that it was dragging her down the escalator like a horse drawn carriage, and looked like if one unfolded it it could be used as an open air shelter in the Iraqi desert. The little thing looked exhaused hefting this thing left, right, forward, back, its sides bulging like those old Xmastime paintings of Santa Clause arriving down the chimney with a loaded bag of goodies. I understand the need for carry bags in an urban environment, I've even been known to load my cell phone, iPod, a couple of geek computer books, and a hard drive into a backpack once in a while, but this seems to be getting out of hand. Is it really necessary for people to carry around bags loaded with 40-50 pounds of detritus? What IS this stuff they're all carrying around anyway? Well let's s...

Have you noticed that potato chip bags have been steadily shrinking for the past few years? Used to be, for $.99 you got about a 17 pound bag of potato chips. I'm talking Lay's potato chips (no one can eat just one!) Then for some reason (I guess potatoes just suddenly started costing 20 times what they used to) that big bag started costing about $4. Then a few years ago, the marketing wiz' at Frito-Lay decided to play some mind games, I guess to keep us from realizing that they were raising prices, and invented this new size bag, that cost the magical $.99. It held about double what we used to get in vending machines or our lunchboxes when I was a kid. I think this was labelled 'The Big Munch' or something stupid like that. The other day, I'm down at the sub shop and I figure I'll grab a 'Big Munch' to go with my turkey sub. I was shocked to see that the $.99 bag from Frito-Lay is now about equal size to what we used to get in the vending machine or...

Walking back to work today after lunch, I passed by the back of a locally famous seafood restaurant. Covering the usual plethora of restaurantly odors (garbage, old mops, bleach) was a heavy blanket, a cloud, nee a THUNDERHEAD of the smell of bacon. What is it about this lowly meat that makes it such a great foodstuff? And the SMELL! And that got me to thinking about smells. Our noses are really amazing things. Pulling scents out of the air, unraveling layer upon layer of aromas to be processed by our olfactory sense. And then there's the nose to brain interface, you know, that weird thing that happens when a smell jogs some latent memory -- for me there are many: - the smell of a kitchen where coffee is brewing and breakfast (usually including eggs and the aforementioned bacon) is either sizzling on the stove, or has recently been consumed - the smell of a carnival -- cotton candy and cheap perfume - brownies baking - grilled steak on a summer evening It's amazing that the bra...

I was in the supermarket the other day, someplace I hate to go, and I noticed something I'd never seen before. Now, I typically buy pretty straightforward stuff with a minimum of junk food. I tend to avoid processed foods when I can, don't eat a lot of mixes or frozen dinners, that sort of thing. Believe me, I'm not a health nut - plenty of bacon, wheat thins, and butter go in the basket, but I try. So, I'm surfing through the overcrowded dairy section looking for butter and what do I run into between the yogurt and the cookie dough (dairy?!?!?) but something called 'cheesecake filling' made by none other than 'Philadelphia Brand' (hey, what the fuck is it with Philly and cream cheese anyway....do they claim to have invented the stuff or something?!?!?). My mind reeled at the thoughts flooding through it as I stared at this new discovery. Why in the hell would ANYBODY want to eat preprocessed cheese-food crap like this and call it cheesecake. Why is it t...

Okay readers, I'm here today to talk about monkeys. That's right, monkeys! I was thinking today, how utterly fascinating monkeys are. They are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, except for politicians, whose closest relatives are of the single-cell variety. I remember a trip to the Bronx zoo years ago, where I watched a silver back gorilla, sitting on a lawn as zoo visitors stood and watched him. He was kingly. It was clear that as far as he was concerned, HE was watching US. I remember that moment when I happened to catch his eye and had the profound feeling that I wasn't really looking at an animal, but that perhaps, just perhaps, just for a second, it was somebody familiar with whom I was sharing a moment..... Which made me think one of my favorite all time television commercials- it was for luggage (either American Tourister or Samsonite...I think American Tourister) where a narrator talks about the toughness of the latest line of luggage, while on camera a su...

Is it me, or are people getting smaller? I keep hearing that Americans are getting bigger and fatter, but whenever I look around, it seems to me that especially the males of the species are shrinking. I live in Cambridge, MA which is college town USA (well at least the Boston area is). All I see anymore are these small feeble looking guys walking around with little or no hair...I mean you could cast a remake of THX1138 with these guys. I don't mean to sound judgemental. Heaven knows that I'm nothing to write home about (my physique has been referred to one that resembles a Coke machine with a bowling ball on top of it). It's not that I particularly mind or have a problem with them , I just wonder if I'm witnessing some side effect of an organic diet and too much 'quiet time'. These guys also seem to all talk very quietly and be very sensitive...I don't know just something I've been noticing. At the other end of the spectrum are the hordes of LOUD teenag...

I had a checkup this week. I'm pushing 50 and have developed type II diabetes, so I see my doctor fairly often (every 2-3 months usually). Now, I went out of my way to avoid doctors for years....I hate being touched, prodded and probed, and have always viewed the medical establishment with equal measures of fear and loathing. Anyway, I had a little problem a few years ago and in treating it, my doctor (who I had just engaged for this particular problem, which means I had just met him) informed me that my blood pressure was rivaling the rate of inflation in Moscow and that we should probably do something about it. From there it was a physical, diagnosis of diabetes, and now I'm a 'patient'. So, I'm at my checkup the other day, and as he's checking my heart, my Dr. (who I like a lot by the way) says "Aren't you a code slinger?" I told him that I write some PERL at my job as a QA Engineer, but I'm not a heavy duty programmer or anything. I then in...

So, yesterday a friend and I set out to update our percussion setups. We both play wind instruments and are learning to play hand drums -- congas (him) and african hand drums (me). So we go to the mega complex music store and start looking around...pretty bad. They have one each of the most expensive congas, but not whole sets. Their prices are also too high...so my friend inquires about a tumbao to match his conga. The saleschild (who has now clearly progressed to a daily thorazine dose as part of his mental hygiene regimen) mumbles something about the fact that they're not in stock. My friend inquires as to how long it would take to get one (answer: mumblemumblemumble) and then points out that the price they are asking is about $50 more than he's seen it elswhere online, to which he would also have to add sales tax. (answer:mumblemumblewe'llmatchanyadvertisedpricesmumblemumblemumble). My friend replies that if the salesdroid will look up a site on the internet, he can sho...

Wow, we live in an age of mistrust, don't we? I mean from the dawn of time there have been people (conspiracy theorists) who never take the facts surrounding an event at face value. These people can be pretty funny. You know, the moon landing was televised, Area 51 in Roswell, THERE"S NO SUCH THING AS THE MAFIA (ha ha ha!)..... And you know, the reason people believe these things is because, naturally, there have been conspiracies throughout history....Nixon and Watergate, the Kennedy Assassination, Milli Vanilli.... But as many of these theorists as there are, and as much as we hear that man has never walked on the moon, Oswald had an entourage, and 9/11 was a CIA op, the greatest conspiracy of all time is never talked about....never complained about.....not even acknowledged by most people. I'm talking about a conspiracy that has reduced most average (and not so average) citizens of this and most other countries to nothing more than Pavlovian drones running through a ...

Hello to everyone out in cyberblog land reading this. This is the first in what promises to be a scintillating series of commentary by yours truly Bigtiny. I'll be sharing my views on life, love, and art; communicating what I believe to be important tidbits of information; and just generally howling at the moon. Hope you enjoy it, but if you don't......tough shit. bigtiny