BIGGIE'S PLACE

A Happy 2011 to all of you. I won’t bother prognosticating or trying to otherwise predict for myself or others what will happen this year. In my experience, that’s the easiest way to ensure something won’t happen. But that’s me. My personal goals don’t go year-to-year. When things happen, they happen, and all I will say is…the sooner the better.

I don’t have any major topics on my mind at the moment, so I’ll just share a few things I found interesting over the past week.

LINKS & VIDEO

-Facebook dude Mark Zuckerberg is TIME’s Person of the Year. The profile article is very long, but very interesting. [TIME]

-Much as I sometimes loathe ESPN, they do a very good job with their end-of-the-year compilations, and their list of the 100 best quotes from sports people in 2010 is no exception. [PAGE 2]

-A hilarious caption by Deadspin on a picture of Mike Singletary posing with a Yoda puppet. Check it out. [Deadspin]

-Probably my favorite movie critic, Richard Roeper, counts down his best and worst movies of 2010. Good watchins.

-In 2011, The Postal Service (whatever that is) will release a series of Pixar stamps. Pretty cool:

Speaking of Pixar, they recently released the teaser trailer for their big 2011 movie, Cars 2. My first reaction is a big ho-hum. Though the original Cars, like every other Pixar flick, was very good, I didn’t have a burning desire for a sequel. In fact, Cars may be my least favorite Pixar movie. These guys are the masters of the original story, yet this year we’re getting a sequel (for the second year in a row), and it’s a sequel to their least good movie. Meanwhile, my favorite Pixar movie ever, A Bug’s Life, remains sequel-less. What gives? Anywho, Cars 2 this summer. Though I’ll see it, I’m not terribly excited about it, but decide for yourself;

The Irony Section. In 2010, Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis played competitors in a ballet company in Black Swan. In 2011, they’ll compete in real life at the box office, as they’re both in ‘friends with benefits’-themed romantic comedies. Portman stars with Ashton Kutcher in No Strings Attached, and Kunis with Justin Timberlake in Friends with Benefits. Funny enough, the title for No Strings Attached in script form was Fuckbuddies. Unfortunately, there was no chance of that title being used, and they then wanted to call it Friends with Benefits, but the Kunis/Timberlake movie had already chosen that title, so Portman/Kutcher ended up with the super innocuous No Strings Attached. Did you follow all that? I barely could.

VS.

I Remember: Part 2

If you think I know nothing about cars now (which I don’t), imagine what I was like at age 17. I remember sometime in 1997, when my first car (a blue, early-90’s Buick LeSabre) had overheating problems. Well, one night, I was near Boston in Chestnut Hill driving my girlfriend home down Route 9, when my car started spewing smoke from under the hood. I pulled over and opened the hood as the white smoke poofed out, and went into panic mode. To a 17-year old kid, this is “end of the world” type stuff. This shouldn’t be happening to me, and it sure as shit shouldn’t be happening as I drive my girlfriend home. I was a teenager, not a mechanic. The priorities in this situation were me and my image, not actually fixing the car. As such, the only thing I cared about at that moment was getting rid of the embarrassing smoke. At that time, my friends and I were big into Super Soakers. This is a whole other story, but where it would have ended was in the fact that at this time of vehicular desperation, I had about 10 Super Soaker water guns in my trunk, of varying sizes and spraying ability. I must have spent $300 on Super Soakers over the course of a few weeks. One of those weapons was the infamous Super Soaker 2000. This thing was like the fucking chain gun of water guns. It had a friggin shoulder strap for Chrissakes! And ask any of my high school friends, being hit with the water from this thing was no pleasant experience. It could shoot a constant, inch-thick stream of water for about 3-5 seconds, and you could hit someone about 30 feet away with it if necessary. If it were any more powerful, the fire department would be using it as a mobile hose to put out forest fires.

I went to the trunk and found the SS2000, and thankfully it still had a decent amount of water in it. You can see where this is headed. Yes, my solution to an overheating car…spray the engine with the biggest water gun available to the general public! Of course, my stupid ass didn’t realize this would just turn smoke into steam, but hey- the smoke was gone! We sat there for a good 20 minutes and waited the engine to cool off, at which point I believe I was able to get to a gas station and buy some coolant. I got my girlfriend home and got the Buick back to Framingham. I loved that Super Soaker. Perhaps in a future installment, I can delve into the semi-criminal activities my friends and I participated in doing drive-bys with our water guns around the neighborhoods of Framingham and the parking lots of the Natick Mall. Something tells me none of our victims will be reading this.

Resolve!

I don’t go for New Year’s resolutions anymore (haven’t in years), but I did think of one for 2011; I will see ZERO movies in theaters in 3D this year. None. Nil. Nada.

To close out, here’s a random clip from Black Ops‘ incredibly fun Theater Mode that I recently uploaded. A guy comes running out of the trailer on Firing Range, and I throw a semtex at him, which sticks to the top of his head. A semtex head shot? Shown from 3 different angles;

Next time: My 10 most anticipated movies of 2011.