Jugglers, Dinosaurs, and the Shiny Maracas

Hey everybody.  John here with another weekend report.  This week was pretty unusual, because my band didn't have any shows to play.  We haven't had a week off since February, so I have to admit that it was nice to just hang out and do normal college kid stuff.  That said though, I'm starting to miss doing things like this every weekend:

Fortunately, we start playing again on the 20th, and we'll have a minimum of three shows before school lets out.

Instead of playing songs about eating people, as I'm accustomed to doing most Friday nights, I attended Juggleville 008: Gravity Protocol, which featured Mayfield 2's own Jacob Lamberth.  It was the first time I've ever attended Juggleville, and I have to admit it was pretty entertaining.  The show featured 007 and his trusty sidekick, whose name I have completely forgotten, as they attempt to stop a madman from doing something nefarious involving gravity.  There's no dialogue, so I can't be very specific about the details.  The combination of juggling and a doomsday device reminded me of a great Far Side cartoon where an audience member heckles a juggler for using nuclear warheads that have clearly been defused.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find this cartoon on the internet, so here's Calvin and Hobbes instead.

Later that night, I decided to return to Bioshock, a game I had started about a month ago but had stopped playing due to large amounts of schoolwork.  Hardcore gamers will probably find me pathetically behind the times, given that the third installment of this series just came out a few days ago, but I tend to only play games once they've been out long enough to be considered nostalgic and, more importantly, dirt cheap.  For those that haven't played it, Bioshock really is one of the best games ever made, and I highly recommend it as long as you can stomach some of the more gruesome elements of the game.  The visuals are amazing, the story is well-developed, and the enemies of the game are incredible.  The game really manages to affect the player on a psychological level, making for an unsettling but very compelling playing experience.  If you're interested, here's a clip that really demonstrates how well-designed the enemies are.  Not only can they be difficult to kill, but they're specifically designed to play off the paranoia of the player, making them some of the best enemies I've ever encountered in a game.

This weekend I ended up watching quite a few movies, beginning on Saturday with Jurassic Park.  For those of you who weren't aware, there has been a recent trend where older films are reformatted for 3D, seemingly in an attempt to make more money without making more movies.  In the case of Jurassic Park, however, I feel that it was actually worthwhile to see the 3D version, even if it meant paying good money to see a film I already own.  Jurassic Park was already a very visually appealing movie, and it looked even better in 3D on an IMAX screen.  I mean, who doesn't want to see this in 3D?

The second film I watched was The Room, a movie I've seen about four times now.  It is widely considered to be one of the worst films ever made, but it fails so completely at everything it attempts that the result is much funnier than the majority of today's comedies.  The music is bad, the stock footage is placed at strange moments, there's an overabundance of spoons for some reason, characters were played by more than one actor, and protagonist/director/producer/writer Tommy Wiseau is the single strangest person to ever be captured on film.  Here's a scene where our hero Johnny goes to buy some flowers, resulting in some of the most awkwardly paced dialogue I've ever heard.

The third movie I saw this weekend was Memento, a film directed by Christopher Nolan.  I won't say much about this movie other than that it's very good and worth your time if you have two hours to kill.

Finally, on Sunday night I ended up going to Kay Bob's, a restaurant on 21st avenue a couple of blocks away from the Commons.  There I met with a few friends to have dinner and participate in the restaurant's weekly Trivia Night.  This was our first time attempting to compete in a trivia night, as an employee creepily pointed out when they promised to take our trivia virginity.  Our team name was the Shiny Maracas, and we actually did pretty well for our first time.  We didn't place, but all of the teams' scores were fairly close, so I feel fairly confident that if we took another stab at it we'd eventually win something.

Anyway, that about covers my weekend.  Here's an amazing video for a song called "Eat Randy."