I have returned from spending just shy of a week in Virginia. Currently, I am enjoying a peach purchased from a fruit stand in front of the orchard in which it was grown. It doesn’t get much better than that.

I’ve reached the point at which I fast forward through sex scenes. I have no patience with gratuitous nudity and it seems like most of the films in which the sex is not gratuitous, the activities are for the most part implied.

It isn’t just sex though, I fast forward through superfluous exposition and dialog. I watch facial expressions instead. It is very rare that I miss something of any real consequence.

It began with slightly damaged DVDs which would freeze when they got to a scratch in the disc. While the majority of the discs I receive from Netflix play without incident, I found that in many cases, if there was a problem, the only way to circumvent it was to skip a chapter ahead. Initially, I would then rewind back to as close to the problem area as possible, but I kept finding that I wasn’t missing anything. There’s a lot of fluff in mediocre movies. People scream, I fast forward. People cry, fast forward. People fuck, fast forward.

The real question, I suppose, is why I am finding this to so often be the case of late. Is it the movies or is it me?

In the great tradition of marketing bedfellows, the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones series hooked up with several other companies in unions based on mutual promotion, including Burger King, Expedia, and, more importantly to me, Dr. Pepper. I drink Dr. Pepper. Daniel drinks Dr. Pepper too and when he was visiting in May we came upon 20 ounce bottles of the stuff with codes under the caps and the hard-to-miss promise, “1 in 6 WINS!”

A couple of months and 31 codes later, I am here to tell you that it is more like 1 in 10 and that’s only if one has a very loose definition of the word “WINS!” For you see, I have “won” three times so far and all three of the “prizes” have really only amounted to digital advertisements. The “prizes” were two of the same wallpaper graphics and a screensaver, respectively. Isn’t that the sort of thing one should be able to download for free from their website? What happened to “1 in 6 WINS!” meaning that fairly often you’d be able to use the cap to get another Dr. Pepper?

It isn’t as if I am going to quit drinking Dr. Pepper, I buy it whether there is a promotion going on or not, but I do think that pretending a downloaded advertisement is some sort of prize is disingenuous of them at best.

Less annoying, but bothersome nonetheless, is that each non-winning code entered brings up the message, “So close!” as if this contest relied somehow on my skill at deciphering and typing a 16 character code. Actually, that isn’t too far off as the codes themselves are hard to read and contain ambiguous symbols that could be a “0″, an “O”, a “D” or a “9″.

In addition, the website gives points for each code entered, win or no, but I can’t find any use for these points. It doesn’t appear that they are actually redeemable for anything. At least when the second Spiderman movie came out, I got a nifty t-shirt for my trouble. This promotion sucks.

Addendum:

Another “winning” code. Yet another identical to the first two wallpaper graphic. At this point, I do believe they owe me an Indiana Jones style fedora.

Further Addendum:

And another “winning” code. This one for another screensaver. While they are approaching something closer to their “1 in 6″ claim, the non-winning codes are, as Daniel noted, actually more desirable. The winning codes do not give one a prize and require one to view an advertisement. The non-winning codes do not give one a prize and do not require one to view an advertisement.

I heard the Van Halen cover, You Really Got Me, on my way home this morning. It always reminds me of this commercial. What I didn’t know was that there was a sequel made, which was apparently seen by very few people due to a profoundly stupid lawsuit filed by Mattel. (Because why on earth would they want a bit of cool, free advertising?)

I can, however, understand Mattel’s suit against Aqua over the song, Barbie Girl, because that was just terrible.

I am typing this with one hand because my left hand is trapped under the Beet Weasel, who is soundly asleep on my lap. At first he was simply resting his head on the back of my hand, but a moment ago (or a moment from when I began this sentence, this is taking awhile) his head began to slip off so now I’m keeping his head up with my hand and I’m pretty sure he’s dreaming because all four of his paws are twitching. I refer to this, and similar positions, as being “cat bound”; as in, “I can’t come to work right now; I’m cat bound.”

Director of Standards Laboratory in North Carolina Retires Rather than Honor Former Senator Jesse Helms

L.F. Eason III, director of the state Standards Laboratory — which calibrates equipment for critical measurements such as the weight of medicines or trucks on a highway — told his staff to ignore the directive. He sent workers an e-mail saying he didn’t think it was appropriate.

“I don’t see how anybody could celebrate his career,” the 51-year-old said in an interview, noting Helms’ opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the filibuster to stall the effort to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. “Everything he did was such a disservice to this state.”

Eason, who had worked for 29 years at the Department of Agriculture, requested the option to retire Monday after his superiors overruled his decision and ordered the flags be lowered. Eason wrote an e-mail to the governor and other supervisors saying he could not in good conscience honor Helms.

The fact that this happened in Helms’ home state shows a real lack of backbone by all those employees in more “liberal” states where they may have even been able to keep their jobs after such a protest.

I have just found out, thanks to this study of nearly 1,000 brands of sunscreen which found that four out five sunscreens actually cause skin damage, that the Neutrogena SPF 70 sunscreen that I use is 6% Oxybenzone — a compound which breaks down in the sun (!) and damages DNA which leads to cancer.

As a matter of fact, some smaller studies have found “an increased risk of malignant melanoma, by far the deadliest form of skin cancer, among regular users of sunscreens“. It just so turns out the Aveeno SPF 30 moisturizer I use on my face every single day all year long isn’t much better, and contains the same compound only in a smaller amount. I am indescribably angry at the moment. These are two companies that I trusted and I will never buy another product from either Neutrogena or Aveeno again.

As an alternative I’m looking at Keys as they got very high marks in the aforementioned study, but they are far more expensive and more difficult to find. There is a branch of the grocery store I shop at listed as a place to buy them in Pennsylvania so I may try to get my local store to pick up the line.

Amanda Palmer’s solo album “Who Killed Amanda Palmer?” is going to be released September 16. Also, I just found out that her co-producer on the project is Ben Folds. It is a bit funny that two of my favorite artists have unexpectedly collaborated on something. So perhaps needless to say I’m looking forward to hearing the whole thing.

You can hear one of the tracks, Astronaut, and see the video here.

I rode the elevator last night with the Elvis impersonator who lives in this building. He was on his way out in costume. I had my first Saturday night off in quite some time and was headed out for a bit of late night grocery shopping. (What an exciting life I do lead.)

I was wearing my “Lucky Charms” hat and he asked if that was my favorite cereal. I confirmed that it was and then found myself telling him that when I was a kid we almost always had generic cereal except on the rare occasion when there was both a sale and a coupon so I think that is why I still like it so much. It tastes special. It was then that I realized how tired I was because I had just responded to a yes-or-no question with my life story, or at least as much as the elevator ride might permit as we had at that time reached the ground floor. In retrospect this sort of thing may happen to him a lot, some people feel as if they know Elvis.

Later, at the grocery store, the act of buying cat food launched the cashier into a story about the death of her family’s cat, “Morris”. Her daughter couldn’t stand the idea of Morris being outside and alone in the rain if they buried him in the woods near their home. She said they all cried so much at the thought that their neighbor believed someone had died. (I thought someone had, but decided to keep that to myself lest I sound like a cat person.) The resolution was that they had Morris cremated and now he resides in a cedar box which they take with them whenever they change residences.

I finally got around to watching Lars and the Real Girl tonight, and I found it disturbing.

*Spoiler Alert*

The premise is that a young man who has a hard time interacting with other people buys and falls in love with a Real Doll. He creates an elaborate back story for her. He is convinced she is a living person. His doctor advises his baffled family to go along with it because he won’t be dissuaded from this delusion anyway until he is ready. So the family goes along with it as does the rest of the town eventually. The doll, “Bianca” soon has a job and a volunteering gig at the hospital. She has a schedule which they keep on a fridge. (To avoid any whiff of impropriety Bianca stays with his brother and sister-in-law who live in the house next door to the detached garage in which Lars lives.) Meanwhile, Lars has been developing a friendship with an actual woman at his workplace named Margo. And that’s where things get creepy.

Bianca’s schedule starts to get in the way of the time Lars and she can spend together. Lars screams at her while the sister-in-law and a friend of the family listen downstairs. The friend remarks that she doesn’t like “his tone of voice”. Clearly the whole town has adopted the notion that Bianca is real. There is another scene in which Lars and Bianca are fighting in the car.

The doctor, in order to have a chance to meet with Lars on a regular basis, has scheduled weekly check-ups for Bianca. The doctor uses this time to talk to Lars and try to work out the root of his problem. And eventually Lars kills Bianca. He decides she is getting worse and eventually she is admitted to the hospital. After some time goes by, on a trip to the lake with his brother and sister-in-law, he decides she has died or needs to die. The brother and sister-in-law have taken a walk and spot him from across the lake standing in the water with the doll in his arms. It is unclear whether or not he has drowned her, though the general wholesomeness of the film suggests he simply ran into the water with her out of grief.

But here’s the thing, whether he drowned her or not, Lars made a decision to kill her. At the end of the movie Margo is there to comfort Lars at Bianca’s graveside. He suggests they go for a walk. And that’s where the film ends. Ostensibly it is a happy ending, except I have this nagging feeling. What if things with Margo eventually get to be hard? Will he want to kill her too?

As Daniel noted had it been a teddy bear, the audience would have immediately caught on to how wrong it is to kill off the imaginary character. This is even exemplified within the movie when Margo’s teddy bear is hanged by a co-worker. But instead the entire film is pervaded by a sense that one is supposed to find it uplifting, a forced air of innocence and salubrity. It is deeply creepy.