Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Best. Doublemint. Commercial. Ever.

So I try to not just tell you about crap I read on Yahoo but, um, this is an awesome article from yahoo. It is about celebrity twins. A surprisingly large number of well-known celebrities have twins.

Like which celebrities?

How about Scarlett Johansson! And Gisele Bundchen.

Now sadly, Scarlett Johansson’s twin is a dude who looks like a skinny Clark Kent, though I’m sure he is still doing just fine.

So ladies and gentlemen, let’s just stop for a moment and think about the fact that Gisele has a twin. It is like God gave us a spare, just in case. And just think, that means there is another super hot Bundchen out there, only that one hasn’t dated Leonardo DiCaprio. How cool is that?

Anyway, here’s the Yahoo
article.

And here is a picture of Scarlett Johansson’s ass, because it is tangentially related.

All the James Bezerras in the house say WHAT!

So I was curious if this whole having-a-website/blog thing has been creating for me more of an “internet presence”, so I googled “James Bezerra (which is my name, keep up guys).

And it seems to be working. It is mostly all writing stuff that comes up, but …

Guess who this guy is?



This is James Bezerra. Not me, a different James Bezerra. How totally interesting is that? For me, I mean, not you.

Anyway, I’m totally kicking this guy's ass on google results. Suck it James!

I would tell you more about him, but the website is in Spanish, which I do not speak, though my Icelandic is coming along well (see below).

Out of curiosity I googled your name too. I found some pictures of you that you probably don’t know are on the internet. You sick puppy.
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Monday, March 30, 2009

There's no I in CIA. Oh, wait ...



Holy Hell Yeah Batman!

Guess who is recruiting RIGHT NOW! Guess who is hiring!

Guess!

No, that’s totally wrong! (did you not see the CIA seal at the top of this post?)

It is the CIA. The Central fricken’ Intelligence Agency is looking for you! And me! Well, more me than you, but you should totally still apply.

Specifically they are looking for people with foreign language skills, so Violet and I are going to go get one of those Rosetta Stone things and learn us some Icelandic! Because who wants to end up in Lebanon or the Khyber Pass when Reykjavik needs protecting too!

We have a whole plan already: Violet and I are going to run the CIA Station in Iceland so that we can live in one of those ice hotels and she can take a lot of pictures and I can write the quintessential Icelandic espionage novel (can you say harrowing climatic foot chase on a glacier?)

Anyway, here is an article about the
CIA’s recruitment efforts.

And here is the address where Violet and I will be living:
1 CIA Street
Icelandia, Iceland, 12345
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Thursday, March 26, 2009

E = mc2

Here is an enumerated short story that I wrote for class:


E = mc2
or
Einstein Ruins a Life, in 20 steps
by
jamie bezerra

1. No one is ever more sullen than a scientist proved wrong.

2. Attorneys know something of this feeling when they lose cases and clients die, without paying.

3. Surgeons know something of this when patients die on the operating table.

4. Soldiers know this feeling too, when their friends die.

5. But no one is ever quite as destroyed as the incorrect scientist.

6. Well, there was William Miller, the minister who twice predicted the end of the world and twice was wrong. He was crestfallen, but his spirits rallied and so he founded the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

7. Then there were those followers of Jesus who believed him when he said, “There shall be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Mathew 16:28). Those people died displease, like people who purchase products advertised on television late at night; only more so.

8. In other professions, suicide is accepted as appropriate when one’s entire existence collapses. Japanese generals have their Seppuku, but classically-trained German Newtonian physicist Victor Jakob, as he sat – 69-years-old – in his study in 1918 reading Einstein’s “General Theory of Relativity”, had no such honorable option. He lit his pipe, puffed from it, set it down, then cried.

9. Jakob did not - as Jesus and William Miller might have – immediately see the bright pink and awful, world-ending potential of the work. But he did hear a giant rumbling sound. The sound was not, however, caused by the rush of a chain reaction of uranium-235 splitting open like a vengeful sun. It was the rumbling of his entire life being invalidated.

10. You can hear what this sounds like for twenty-four seconds: Here.

11. Professor Jakob was so sullen that he disappeared from the world. He stayed in his study for weeks and wrote letters to all of his former students. The letters were all apologies.

12. Insensitive students joked that the Professor wouldn’t come outside because – with the nature of gravity now in constant flux – he was afraid that the moon might fall on him.

13. These jokes were not only unfunny, they were also mean-spirited.

14. Jakob’s eldest son was an attorney, he tried to sympathize. “You don’t understand,” the old Professor told him, “the law still exists.”

15. Jakob’s middle son was a surgeon, who tried to be empathetic, “You don’t see,” the frail old man replied, “medicine still makes sense.”

16. Jakob’s youngest son was a soldier, who admitted that he had lost friends and questioned his understanding of the world, but the shriveled German physicist said just, “Soldiers aren’t expected to speak the language of God.”

17. Sullen and alone, in his dark and dusty study, Victor Jakob died at the desk where so much of his work had been done.

18. A Minister spoke at the funeral, about Jesus – who was also a teacher – and about how Jakob had touched the lives of so many students.

19. After the service, a bunch of schoolboys stood in a circle and smoked cigarettes and one said, “Can you believe he spent his entire life studying the motion of non-quantum mechanical, low-energy particles in weak gravitational fields!”

20. “Yeah,” another said, “what a jerk!”
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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

I Miss You!

Oh my poor blog!

I miss you so.

It has been so busy that I have not been able to shower my love down upon you. Take some solace, please, in the fact that it is not just you that has suffered because of this hectic schedule. I have had a pair of pants at the dry cleaners for three months now. And Violet misses you too, because without you, my poor blog, into which to empty my musings, she has had to bear the brunt of them. So she too will be happy when I return to you, dear blog.

One day soon, we will be together again.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

My Girlfriend's Dating Life

So Violet was getting ready for work and she was wearing a cute outfit: dark blue blue jeans, with a green sweater, and a white collared shirt underneath. I asked her, “How come you look so cute today?”

And she said, “I have a date!”

Whatever.

And I should have said, "Just because you say things that are witty and quick and make people laugh, doesn’t mean you’re funny.”

In My Time of Dying

Below is a very, very short short story exercise I wrote for one of my classes. I think it is funny, but no one else who has read it seems to care.



In My Time of Dying
By James Bezerra

Zeppelin is such a loaded word when you say it because suddenly in my head there is a music video of the Hindenburg exploding over the bitchin’ bridge of “Kashmir” and it is a singularly sweet moment of awesomeness until my brain catches up to my ears and I realize that you are screaming, “Look out! That out-of-control zeppelin is about to crash on top of y

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Thursday, March 12, 2009

Life Imitates Art Imitates Life

Oh holy hell, I am totally torn right now. I just heard on CNBC that a writer/reporter type guy named Seymour Hersh is coming out with a story that during the Bush administration there existed a secret assassination squad called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that answered directly to (and only to) the Vice President’s office. That’s right, Dick Cheney employed a personal hit squad. Apparently the group was made up of guys from Delta Force and other Special Operations units, but it existed and operated separate from the Pentagon and even the CIA.

And so I am torn, because when the Israelis do these things I’m all like, “Fuck yeah. That’s why you don’t mess with the Israelis” but when it is us doing it, I’m all, “Perhaps there is some moral ambiguity here that I’m not really comfortable with.”

And even more than that, I’m torn because while I realize that it is not a good idea for America to be getting back into the death squad business, the writer in me is all like, “Hell yes this is an awesome idea!” Because I totally want to write a regrettably action-oriented script one day, and things like this just lay the groundwork for that script.

Now you say, “But that was already a movie and it was called Munich.”
And I say, “Did you see Munich? Only Steven Spielberg could have fucked up that story quite so thoroughly.”

“Now wait a minute,” You say, “did you just cast aspersions on the living deity; the genius that is Steven Spielberg? Whom we have all unanimously agreed is the greatest film maker of all time?”

And I say, “Yes.”

Now I like him, I do. He seems like a good person and he has done some great work. Some of the best work I will probably live to see, BUT holy shit his last like five movies have been awful. They have had fun parts (there were parts of Munich I liked very much) but – all in all – they have been bad movies. I’m sorry. It is just true. They were all way too long and they had too many of those not-endings (when you think the movie is over and then, inexplicably, it isn’t). And they would get so preachy. And what the fuck is with the aliens at the end of A.I.? I mean - I’m not stupid - I get it, but it didn’t work. Movies have to work within their own little worlds. The great thing about a movie is that it gets to define its own reality. It gets to throw out the rules of our world and live by its own, but generally it goes badly when it then violates its own rules. I think A.I. did that. And so do you too! Don’t be a Spielberg apologist. You know it was bad.

And how about that scene at the end of Munich when Eric Bana is having sex and its inter-cut with the massacre from the beginning of the movie (that you didn't see at the beginning). You know what that was? Bad writing. Sorry Tony Kushner (you are great and wonderful, but you know that that ending was artificial and contrived. I bet Steven was standing over your shoulder as you wrote it, whispering in your ear, “I want to do the part when the hostages get killed at the END. Can you make that work?”)

So anyway, I like this idea of a government assassination ring. I like it as a premise for a movie, not as a foreign policy.

Here is a link
to a story about Hersh's findings.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Wondrous Life




I'm so excited! Tonight I am going to start reading "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" for my Hybrid Narrative class. It is rare that you are assigned a book that you want to read and so this is like having my cake and eating it too! I guess!

I never really understood that saying. Doesn't it mean the same thing as a sentence if I rephrase it as "Getting to eat the cake I have!" But I'm pretty sure that no longer works as a saying because now you're just like, "Well ... yeah. Why wouldn't you eat the cake that you already have?"

This is probably a saying that has some very specific meaning that I am simply unaware of. Somebody is going to be all: "It means such-and-such, dumb-ass." And then I will feel like a dumb-ass.

Well, whatever.

I like to think that it has something to do with Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" thing. I feel like these two things are (or should be) cosmically connected.

But anywhoo ...

I'm totally going to read the hell out of some Juno Diaz later.


That's probably not true. It's like 8pm already and I'm just barely leaving work and I probably won't read until I get in bed at like Midnight and then I will fall asleep in like five minutes because I got up before six and have to again tomorrow, but what do you care? There is no reason why you should. God, I am awful at this whole blogging thing.

Sorry.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Where did you go Nick?

Hey, remember Nick Stahl?



What ever happened to that guy? He was so cool and then he did that awful Terminator movie and now he is just gone.

Too bad. It is always so sad when young actors with great potential disappear.

China, Bloggers, Hide-and-Seek, Insanity

Is anyone else following this thing in China about the guy who died playing hide-and-seek? I caught it awhile ago on one of those 'Oddly Enough' blurb things on Reuters, but I keep re-encountering it and each time it gets stranger.

Basically this guy was arrested in China for illegal logging. That's kinda random and funny, right?

Well then, while in jail he dies from a mysterious head wound. Weird, right?

Well then the Chinese blogs pick up on the story. Strange, I didn't know blogging was a big deal in China, right? Apparently it is huge.

So once the bloggers pick up on it, the Chinese government is all, 'Oh shit, I guess we look kinda brutal and authoritarian.' So they release a statement that the guy died because he ran into a wall playing hide-and-seek. WTF, right? This dude must have gotten really excited playing hide-and-seek.

Well then the Chinese bloggers are all like, 'That's so bullshit!'

And so now, the government is getting so much media pressure that they decide to set up a commission to investigate the whole thing. That's cool, right? Yay bloggers-for-justice!

To make everybody happy, the commission is headed by a famous Chinese blogger. Everything comes full circle now, right? All is cool.

But wait! Some other Chinese bloggers find out that the blogger in charge of the commission is actually on the Chinese government's payroll. He gets a stipend to write pro-government blogs! WTF, right?

Now it is this big deal because it has come out that the Chinese government actually employs an army of writers to write pro-government blogs, like 30,000 (says NEWSWEEK). That is some pretty scary propaganda-machine stuff right there, right?

Here is the NEWSWEEK article.

Critical Theories Demystified

So I have had this thing banging around in my head because my brain works in such a way that I like to try to find connections between the subject matter of my various classes (one semester I was taking Anthropology and Statistics and I connected the shit out of those! I felt like I was discovering gravity). Well I recently read a bunch of the Jorge Luis Borges (this crazy bastard was so Method in the way he worked that he went blind while working as a librarian, which is perfectly funny if you are familiar with the dry irony of his writing). I am also suffering through a critical theories of literature class (it is interesting but DENSE). Anywhoo … here is the result (which is certainly only funny to me):

Aristotle reads Jorge Luis Borges:

What the fuck is this?

Immanuel Kant reads Jorge Luis Borges:

I have no fucking idea why I like this.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel reads Jorge Luis Borges:

This fucking guy isn’t German, is he?

Jorge Luis Borges reads Jorge Luis Borges:
What the fuck do you guys not get?

(Just as a post-script, I know that writing something this masturbatoryly intellectual totally makes me into the kind of person that I always bitch about [Like the guy in one of my classes who finds everything ‘metonymic ‘. I always want to say: Hey asshole, lend me your ear for a second. You are a douche bag!] I guess now I should just buy a BMW and start wearing necklaces from American Eagle with bottle openers on them and decorating my apartment with hand-blown glass bongs and working on my spec script exclusively in coffee shops.)

A Haiku For You

So I came in to work on a Saturday to get a jump on next week, but it turns out that the stuff I need in order to start working was not done by other people last week. So I called a guy - yeah, apparently I'm the kind of asshole who ruins other people's weekends (sorry Curt) - and he is uploading some stuff from home.

So while I am here waiting for my files to upload, I am writing Haikus about the experience:

I am here at work
but my work is dependent
on people not here.

Waiting for files
to upload to the server
on a Saturday

Writing a Haiku
on company time is much
more fun than working.

I'm totally a rockin' Haiku poet. Henderson and Blyth and Yasuda can all suck it!

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Violet can do at once ...

... what takes me a thousand words.

Violet has been engineering the creation of a website for me so that I can shamelessly whore myself to the world. God loves her for that. But there is more! She took some pictures for me to use. Below is just one of them. You shall see the others soon!



Violet is awesome!
Check out her Flickr!