Where's My Flying Car?

In the future we will all be wearing more loose fitting underwear.


In the future fine fashion will be made of potato skins because of its unique texture and delicious aroma; sadly this will drive perfume sales to record lows, eventually bottoming out the industry.


In the future hepatic technology will make the sense of touch obsolete for all but a few robots, those robots will be considered "wannabes" and will be snubbed at all the coolest nightclubs


In the future a man/woman can make a living by shucking oysters full time, but they will not do so because oyster shucking will be considered murder.


In the future the Mexican civil war between the Rockeros and Los Emos will end tragically when a Rockera named Julieta commits suicide after her Emo lover Romero is assassinated by her cousin Chancho.


In the future lunar field trips will be possible but only for children with 'special needs'; normal kids will have to go to the tide pools at Cabrillo Beach…again.


In the future lemons will cost $3 each and a slice of pie will be given away for free by school children dressed as the girls in the "Simply Irresistible" video.


In the future hackers will break the 4th dimension causing rifts in the space-time continuum where you can get male enhancement products and chumps from Nigeria need your help to claim the millions their dead uncles left to them.


In the future swarms of killer bees will invade the United States and with their funky beets and modern lyrics they will cause mayhem on American pop charts.


In the future, due to the great aluminum shortage beer will no longer be stored in cans but rather in gold cylinders called “rings” thus troubling many husbands when they misunderstand their wives and get them a pair of gold beer-rings for Christmas.


In the future laptops will become hand tops, thus causing millions in damage all across the country during our newest and coolest holiday, National High Five Day.


In the future internet dating will be considered passé and all the hip youngsters will go retro by clubbing their desired girl or boy over the head and dragging them to their pimped out caves.

Simmons is Pink!

From movies.com: "Stay for the credits and count the digital animation people who are all probably really, really exhausted by now: For example, I counted nearly 40 names that worked on cloth and hair. That's it. Weeks and weeks of animating cloth and hair. Next time your boss makes you restock the plastic-cup lids for an hour, you think of that and count your blessings."


Our hair and cloth team is better then yours!

Seriously.

In 2007 the average person worked about 2000 hours, most of us had surpassed that by late August. Over 100,000 (wo)man-hours devoted to styling, draping, simulating, and animating . These are most, not all, of my fellow cloth and hair monkeys who slaved away for hours, for days, for months on what I like to consider the finest simulation work to ever hit the big screen.

We are ripper, slasher, gouger, we are the teeth in the night,
WE ARE BEOWULF!...cloth and hair T.D.'s.

The DVD "drops" in a week. Buy it and marvel.

Toe Who?

Okonomiyaki (Japanese-style savory pancakes)

Ingredients

• Dough
• 1.5 cups flour
• 7 oz. water

• 2 eggs
• Cabbage
• 1 package of firm tofu, cubed

• Possible ingredients to put into/onto Okonomiyaki
• Katsuobushi*: Dried, shaved benito (katsuo)
  
• Aonori*: Green, dried seaweed.
  
• Sauces
• Brown okonomiyaki sauce*
• Mayonnaise

Preparation

• Cut four large, green cabbage leaves without the hard, white core in thin strings (ca. 4 mm).
• Mix the water, flour, eggs and the cabbage strings together.
• Add the cubed tofu
• Fry the dough like a pancake in a small frying pan

• Before turning the okonomiyaki over, and while the dough is still quite soft, you may put other ingredients on top of the dough.
• 
  
• Turn the okonomiyaki.
• When fried well, serve the okonomiyaki with katsuobushi, aonori, mayonnaise and okonomiyaki sauce.

Mi Familia

My dad used to tell me the story of my grandfather during the great depression . He told me about a US government which offered Mexicans a free train ride to the US/Mexico border and then an offer to pay half of their train ticket to travel anywhere within Mexico. Coach, one way. My grandfather seized it; he would have been a fool not to. He and my grandmother packed up their son and two daughters, and moved back to Sonora, Mexico. It's a happy story about a man making a choice to better the lives of his children. Today I wonder if that's the truth, or if it's even close.

It was called the Mexican Repatriation and it was a lie from the beginning. Repatriation is what you do with refugees after a war when they want to go back home. What was done in the '30s was nothing of the sort.

Some were American citizens that never mattered, some were asked for papers and dragged off before they could be produced from a nightstand, all of them were the result of bigotry. The Irish were not asked to leave, nor were the Italians or any European for that matter, but lord help the Mexican who was taking a job from a deserving American. Couple that with Eugenics, the prevailing "scientifically" backed racial hatred of the day, and the Mexican undesirables had to go. My father tells me the story and says it was my grandfather's choice to go back and that may be true. When the program first started some Mexicans did leave the country voluntarily but when they didn't leave fast enough the US started to push and push hard.

A decade later the US went to war and my uncle Hector, as an American citizen came back across the border and enlisted. He was followed by his sister, my aunt Maria Jesus, and then the rest of his siblings. My father finally making it back to the US in 1962. It's the second attempt by these Aguilars to get themselves a piece of the American Dream. We're a family once denied. But guess what suckas, we're back and we are going nowhere. Lock up your children because we're eating them for supper!

Lung Collapse

If you've ever had a gaping hole
surgically created somewhere in your chest then you'd understand. Like most amputees there's not only a feeling of still wearing the limb but of it actually weighing even more then it had before. Imagine a slab of concrete attached to a forty pound chain welded to your ribcage and you have an idea. You walk slower, and you breathe more shallow, but I guess that’s what to expect when you have your heart removed. Luckily it wasn't permanent. Mine was in India at a ceremony for her Grandfather.

The surgery was a complicated affair which took about ten days during which I was free to perform almost all of my normal functions but at half wattage. Surprisingly aside from the afore mentioned ailments I was as nimble as usual I just possessed a tenth of my usual joie de vivre.

After what seemed like a decade the heart came back better than it had left me and I found breathing to be twice as easy. The air seemed cleaner and even food tasted better. To that end I had a taco for dinner and I plan on taking up running again.

On a separate note El Insituto Mexicano del Sonido is creating some of the best music I’ve ever heard.