Apparently, I'm rooting for the Colts

You can click on this link (I'm sure it's too late for you by the time you're reading this) and discover which team you should be rooting for during the Superbowl. It's actually quite streamlined and well-done, though... strange and unsettling that any sports nut of a webmaster should spend time on something like this.

Apparently, my love for independent films makes me a Colts fan.* Who are you going for?

* I actually am going for the Colts, but only - only - because I want Peyton to win one. Because I like Peyton. And I don't want to feel bad for him the next time the Patriots face him in the playoffs, so I can root for them to rip him apart. Literally, I think.

The most unlikely thing every to be applicable from my college education.

My film-school education came to bear the other day as I came across an Entertainment Weekly article that mentioned "vagina dentata." It brought back a rush of unwelcome memories.

"Vagina dentata" appears in the myths of several cultures, notably several North American Indian tribes, and means, literally "toothed vagina" in Latin. Those with a linguistic background among us might have gathered that by now. Actually, pretty much anyone with a vague understanding of how Latin works might have figured it out, too. It speaks of the fear in men of sex, because... well, let's not get into that.

Anyway, I'm not all that comfortable writing about this because the whole subject scares the tar out of me, but here's the story: when we discussed the theory in class, we discussed in terms of movies that are not apparently sexual to the casual observer, but metaphorically, they positively reek of sex. A lot of horror movies are made this way. The movie we chose to use for our discussion this was Ridley Scott's Alien, the movie that essentially moved him up from a promising newcomer into the ranks of one of Hollywood's top directors.

Now, I love Ridley, but Alien has not withstood the test of time well. It came out in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, and hasn't had the advantage of having George Lucas go back in 300 times to redo all the special effects. It's a little hokey. But it does still have the general horrifying aspect of an alien attaching itself to your face and laying eggs inside of your stomach that grow up to be a huge alien and explode out of your stomach while you're having dinner with your fellow astronauts. That aspect has certainly not lost its terror - for me, at least. Maybe you're immune to that sort of thing. Sicko.

Anyway, the article in question was not talking about a film like that. The article was talking about this film.

So, I guess, this whole post ended up being an argument against going to film school, huh?

I'm surprisingly good with fortune cookies.

Have I ever mentioned how good I am at getting excellent fortunes every time I eat Chinese food?

I know that's a strange talent to be proud of, but I'm stunningly lucky at them for someone so generally misbegotten. Most people get things like "life is a hard road, but those who persevere are stronger for it," or "think happier thoughts." I generally get things like "the people around you will come to see your ideas are superior," and "it will be hard for people to not fall in love with you."

Those are both real fortunes I've gotten.

I once bragged about this to a group of my friends, and they laughed and scoffed (I have great friends, you see). "No one's good at getting fortunes," they pointed out. "It's just all chance."

"I really am," I replied. "I know it sounds weird, but I'm lucky at it."

I had the poor judgment to be holding an unopened fortune cookie in my hands while I said this.

"Prove it," they said.

"I'm going to," I said, cracking open the fortune cookie with a bravado that, to this day, I have no idea where it came from. "I'm just very lucky this. I'll show you."

"No way. Nobody's lucky at this."

"I am. I'm just very lucky."

I pulled out the slip of paper and read my fortune aloud: "You are very lucky."

They stared at me open-mouthed. "There's no way that actually happened," one of them whispered.

I bring this story up because a few days ago, I cracked open a fortune cookie and read: "Your ability to find the silly in the serious will take you far." I don't know what that means, exactly, but I am so pumped for this.

In a related note, I'm starting the writing process for my musical adaptation of Hotel Rwanda this week.

Please, before I go.

Three fun things:

1. I've developed a new film-geek game. It's like playing 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon by yourself.

Let's say that you just watched a film... say, Smokin' Aces. If you're like me - obviously, you're not, or you would've come up with this geeky game yourself - you want to go to IMDB and look up to see who's in the film, what other films they've been in, who wrote the film and what else they've written. "Why do I want to know that?" you ask. You just do. It's fun.

You arrive on the IMDB homepage. You could go up to the search field at the top to type in the name of the movie, but that would be cheating. Instead, you have to click a link somewhere on the main page to get started. You look around and there's no link to Smokin' Aces (there actually is, of course, since the movie just opened, but stick with me). So you're going to have to start clicking somewhere else.

What's this over here? There's a link to a story about Peter Jackson not getting to direct The Hobbit? You click on that, and then on Peter Jackson's profile. There it lists all the movies he's directed. You click on The Return of the King, which starred Dominic Monaghan as Merry. You click on Dom's profile. Monaghan is also on "Lost," starring Matthew Fox, who is in, you guessed, Smokin' Aces. There you are.

But you also watched Letters From Iwo Jima this week, did you? Well, you're going to need to click over to there, too. So you click on Jason Bateman's profile. Bateman's starring with Jamie Foxx in the upcoming The Kingdom, and Foxx was once co-starring with Tom Cruise in Collateral, who co-starred with Ken Watanabe in The Last Samurai, and Watanabe is the star of Letters From Iwo Jima. You are now free to poke around this page until you decide you want to go to another movie.

I've wasted a full two or three hours of work on this game this weekend, and I just made it up yesterday. Who knows what the coming week will hold?

And yes, I'm prepared to take commental abuse about this game.

2. I bought a Nerf basketball set, and I've created a game in which you have to hit two walls and roll the ball off top of the cabinet before sinking the basket. I've almost killed myself, the 13-year old son of my boss, and come close to destroying my G5 and an $8,000 camera. But I'm getting great at the shot.

3. gomusic.ru

Because of some loophole in the Russian copyright system, you can legally download any music you want here for fifteen cents a song. You can buy any album for about $1.50. I'm swearing off iTunes for life.