Penguins Have the Crappiest Lives Ever ... and Other Random Musings

Just got back from seeing the surprise hit documentary March of the Penguins ... and man am I glad I'm not a freakin' penguin.

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS REVIEW:

Have to say I really enjoyed this one. Basically, the cinematography is stunning. It boggled my mind how this film put you right there with the animals it was documenting. By the film's end, you felt like you knew these penguins as if they were people - the power of this film's narrative really is incredible. My only complaint is that it might have been nice to have a little less personification and a little more of the actual science behind some of the phenomena we were witnessing. Mostly though, the narration by Morgan Freeman was crisp, interesting, and added a lot to the movie. The classical soundtrack lended great ambiance to the awe-inspiring arctic backdrops. What more can I say? The journey of the penguins that this film documents is one of those real-life quirks of nature and evolution that makes most fictional plots look ordinary in comparison. Gotta warn ya though - this movie has some SAD parts. Seriously, don't get too attached to these human-looking penguins, because ("spoilers," if you will ...) not all of them are going to survive the fierce winter climates of the antarctic. Anyways, this one is definitely worth seeing - thanks to its breathtaking and up-close scenes of unspoilt nature and the animal kingdom - especially if you have any interest in nature, animals, or just really, really like penguins. My grade: A-

- But seriously, the lives of these penguins friggin' sucks. They spend like a quarter of each year in water - their natural habitat. Then the rest of the year is spent trekking across hundreds of miles of frozen wasteland to mate and find food, during which time they are practically near-death from being so hungry after going for months at a time without even eating. Damn talk about a hard knock life ...

- Speaking of which, I fill in for the dreaded TICKETBOX for ONE MEASLY HOUR today and lo and behold all hell breaks loose, even as a group of my fellow pages looked on in terror during their training session so that they too can experience the wonders of manning the ticketbox. During this one hour, let's see what happened:

1.) A crazy old woman, an actress no less (never heard of her but I guess sh was the maid on Will and Grace or something?) stumbles into our office yelling and screaming about how she has a meeting at MSNBC and she's late. I tell her she's at the Guest Relations office, not at MSNBC. She goes nutso, and starts yelling and demanding that WE PROVIDE HER A RIDE TO MSNBC. Um, yeah. I tell her that we just sell tours here, we don't provide transportation. She freaks out and tells me that "this is gonna blow up" or some such nonsense, and then MAKES A GUN-SHOOTING MOTION IN MY GENERAL DIRECTION - as if she was aiming a gun at me and pulling the trigger! WHAAAAAATTTT?!?! Well SCREW YOU CRAZY OLD LADY, I don't need your crap, it's not my fault that you don't know where you're going.

2.) The guy who I was filling in for did a few things that caused some problems. One was that he doodled a severed hand on our tour sign-up sheet, which was kind of embarassing.

3.) He also assigned two consecutive tours to have orange-colored wristbands, which resulted in a lot of confusion. So when the first guide came out and asked for everyone with orange wristbands to follow him, he had almost 30 people follow him even though each tour should have no more than 14 people. And the tour guide, being very inexperienced, took ALL 30 people with him on his tour! Which left exactly ONE person for the following tour, which should have had 14 people! Oy ...

4.) Some woman came claiming to be a part of a group of 8. Of course only two were actually present, but she insisted that she reserve 8 spots for a tour. So the other 6 don't show up for another hour, meaning that the entire tour schedule had to be rearranged due to this little change-up.

5.) The whole time all this craziness was happening, a group of about six pages were looking on in complete terror, realizing that soon they too would have to deal with all of this craziness. Of course, our store supervisor, realizing that all hell was breaking loose, took the opportunity to continually point out that "this is NOT how you should be doing things," and "this hopefully WON'T happen when you are ticketbox head." Hopefully, it won't.

What else?

- Saw Stiffler himself on the Tonight Show today. Kinda funny though Dukes of Hazzard looks pretty bad. Next week though two of my favorite comedians from back in the day, Norm McDonald and Kevin Nealon (both former Weekend Update hosts, probably my two favorite of all time actually ...) will be on the Tonight Show, so hopefully I'll be there to see them. Also saw some lameass band called Aqualung, kind of Coldplay wannabes, which in my book is terrible as I really don't even like Coldplay.

TOMMOROW:

- Chris Agra comes to LA!

FRIDAY:

- Avril does an outdoor concert on the Tonight Show!

NEXT SUNDAY:

- I'm going to see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers live in concert!

NOW:

- I haven't been able to do my laundry because I have no more money left on my laundry card and the machine that refills your points is freaking broken. That really sucks, as I'd really like to do my laundry.

500 YEARS FROM NOW:

- Due to global warming and climate change, penguins forced to live amongst humans. Penguins become our supreme overlords and force humans to build igloos out of toxic waste for their own amusement. HEED MY WARNING - THE PENGUINS WILL RULE US ALL!

Alright, too much penguin on the brain. Until next time, dudes.