Who's the cat that won't cop out when
there's danger all about?
-Shaft!
Right on.
We saw Shaft (2000). Jackson as John Shaft looked way cool, and had confidence to spare. Roundtree as Shaft wasn't scared of a damn thing, either, but he had more cool, more of a laissez-faire attitude. Jackson was like a force of nature.
here's this bleeding-heart foo from Salon:
As the renegade cop hero, the nephew of Richard Roundtree's original Shaft, Samuel L. Jackson metes out justice with his fists and gun in a way that would appall me if it were Clint Eastwood dishing out the punishment. And yet, good liberal that I am, I have to confess that I loved "Shaft." ...... The brutality increases as the movie goes on and Singleton falls into the right-wing sensibility that action movies are prone to. "Shaft" says that the laws and courts and the restrictions on police protect the scum and that the only way to clean things up is for a lone man to break the rules. That's the malarkey that "Dirty Harry" peddled in the same year the original "Shaft" came out.<.small>
pffft
Other than that, we had sushi, and went to Barnes & Noble. I bought the O'Reilly book on System Performance Tuning with my LUG discount, yay, and realized once again that the coffee at B & N tastes like the tiles at the Baths of Caracalla. And they don't have soy. When I went up to the counter and waited some distance from the line to ask for it, this Yeti woman said "The lines starts over there." So I said "Yes, I see that the line is over there. Do you have soy milk?" And no, they don't. The fact that Starbucks employees receive better benefits than they do doesn't pluck the strings of my heart. All right, few things do, but that doesn't change the fact that nearly all of the B&N coffee bar brats are surly. Cut me a fucking twig:
1) I order a small, black coffee, not one of those mint mocha caramel frappucino nightmares, so it's not like I'm making the only person there jump through hoops with 7 people behind me in line. And so what if I did? If they want to market the shit out of those mocchiato monstrocities, they should goddamn well expect to make some of 'em.
2) I'm nice enough, but they don't thank me, or smile at me, or anything remotely resembling either. If you're that unhappy with your job, then get a different one. How oppressed are they? They make coffee (coffee that sucks), and they bake. Get a grip. Being rude to customers and acting like you're doing people a big-ass favor by doing your job does not pave the road to success.
Anyway. Now I'm at work. Someone took my fucking stapler again, so I lock it up in my drawer every night.
Now, if you'll excuse me, my locust ship is arriving.