Saturday was awesome! Jim and I went to 5 movies in 10 hours.
(1) Red Dragon ** VERY similar to Hannibal.
(2) My Big Fat Greek Wedding *** Funny chick flick. Can’t beat lamb on a spit in the front yard.
(3) Sweet Home Alabama **Boring chick flick. Need some lamb on a spit in the front yard.
(4) Barbershop ****The only unique thing I saw all day. Ice Cube rules, and so does the guy that looks like Frederick Douglas.
(5) Road to Perdition *Don’t even bother. No lambs, no spits, no front yards. No fun to watch.

We topped off the night with my first White Castle ever. Those little mousemeat burgers may NEVER enter my body again.

IHaveAComplex–As I wrote in my one and only Manifesto my parents didn’t help me in the naming department. So when a coworker sent me this image – thinking I would get a kick out of seeing “Zippy” on the cover of a book, I was shocked. Dumbfounded. My mind was spinning. Can it be that my nickname ALSO suffers the same gender bending fate? Ugh. I suppose I now have to buy the damn book…

The other day I overheard someone say that Home Depot is a “Man Mall”. That women go there all the time to find hot men. Ya know like shopping at a mall where all that’s on sale is men…tee hee. And men go there and shop til they drop like they’re a chick at the mall…tee hee. And I admit that I have been spending an amazing amount of hours at Home Depot while I’ve been finishing my basement. I have to ask though, what motivated a guy to sit in a Home Depot for a 2 day dare in which the penalty was a faceload of peanut butter and fluffernutter? Find out more by reading his journal about it.

Last year we bought our 2001 Dodge Durango from the local Dodge dealer. We were greeted by a weird little guy who barely spoke English, who was kind of your typical car salesman. We ended up doing the deal with the owner and just using this salesman as the not-so-helpful let me screw-you-on-this-deal guy. Turns out this salesman killed a buyer at the dealership the other day by mistakenly backing his new truck into him. The poor father who was killed was probably saving his 2 year old son. This really freaked me out. What a terrible course of events for everyone involved. I’m going to resume trying not to think about it now…

We checked out A Beautiful Mind today at a real movie theater. I’m no film snob. It doesn’t need to be “indie”. It doesn’t need to be artsy, nor French. It just has to be good. Mainstream, least common denominator, watered-down-for-the-ticket-sales good. Russel Crowe is great. Just like my sicko fascination with Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson movies. All this was to distract Tricia and I from the fact that we took our 8 week old to day care today. ugh! Oh yeah we saw Fast and the Furious on DVD too. nice ride!

Tricia and I ventured out to the 2002 Chicago Autoshow yesterday. Whereas last year, finding the CTA bus back to Union Station (no signs anywhere!) and sprinting after the friendly bus driver were our greatest adventures, this year involved taking our brand new son Mason on the trip. The competent McCormick place staff directed us to 3 different floors for entry into the show. And thinking we were smarter than 1 million other Chicagoans we bought our tickets on the Internet so we could go to the special “Fast Line”. You know, the one that ended up having 1 million other Chicagoans in it.

OK, about the cars…You can tell the economy has been horrible by how few concept cars there were. The 2002 Concepts didn’t seem to have nearly the imagination as last year’s either. I really think the car companies are all played out on the cross-over SUV and were just out of ideas for this year. My favorite trend however is the retro-new vehicles. My favorite is the Chevy SSR. This thing is part truck, part convertible, part hot-rod. It is bad ass! I like that the car companies are digging into the past – a time when people didn’t have to please all the demographics to get a car produced. Funny that I found a classic 1950’s Chrysler 300 to be best in show.