Well, now that the Official VM NBA 2006-2007 preview is wrapped up, I can get back to the ongoing ruminations and ramblings about my life. I’m heading out to Orlando at 6:30am for my next biz-nass trip, but I figured we oughtta catch up, dear readers.
First and foremost: my wife bought a car! Amy finally got out of debt (college loans, etc.) last week, so the time was ripe to get back into debt. She’s been in love with the Mini Cooper S for a while now, so we checked them out earlier this week. They talked us into buying a 2006, and Amy & her salesman sat down and built the model she wanted online. It’ll take 4-6 weeks for it to show up. Until then, this is all you get:
We took a similar model out for a test drive today, and she fell further in love. I fit pretty easily into the car, which was a major concern. If I wasn’t opposed to buying a German car, I’d be interested in getting one for myself; they’re awfully well engineered and the ride was impossibly smooth.
While the salespeople were really pleasant and not “car salesman”-like, someone did try to screw us out of $550 when we signed off on the order this morning. The sales manager presented us with an itemized “build page” that showed the order as Mini had received it. “That’s the right amount, right?” he asked about the total at the bottom of the list.
The dollar amount was the same as we were quoted, but Amy noticed that the build page included a $550 Harman Kardon sound system, which was not part of our order. “Coincidentally,” the $550 destination charge was missing. So the manager had to “fix up” our order and produce a new build page. But this one was a printout from a “later stage in the build process” and did include the destination charge, but not that stereo, which was removed.
Which is to say, we would’ve been paying an extra $550 for the car, if Amy hadn’t gone over the list closely. I’m not necessarily accusing the sales manager at Mini of trying to jack up the price, but it does seem like an odd mistake to make.
Anyway, the car is ordered, and Amy’ll be able to track its progress online from when it leaves the factory in the UK and ships out to Port Newark. That’ll be fun. Or infuriating.
After this morning’s test-drive and signoff, we went out to catch Borat. I have to concur with Ron Rosenbaum’s take on the movie: it’s nowhere near as funny as the segments on Da Ali G Show, largely because the movie has to create a “plot” to get Borat from one place to another. A number of those segments — he has dinner with a commerce group down south, he talks to a group of black kids about how to be black, for example — felt scripted, more Larry David uncomfortable-improv than the sheer genius of having Borat at a wine tasting in the Midwest. “Oh, and is he your slave?”
Moreover, the scenes of his life and the depictions of Kazakhstan actually are less fun, because they literalize things that are far funnier when Borat intimates at them. That is, actually seeing the Running of the Jews is less funny than having Borat make a comment about it to an unsuspecting person in America.
So, while it was an entertaining flick, it just wasn’t as funny as watching him in action in his interviews. Although the scene in the bed & breakfast was hysterical.
One more thing: What the f*** is wrong with people that they’d bring their 8-year-old children in to see that movie? I mean, how out of touch are parents if they can’t figure out that an “R” rating just might mean that it’s not suitable for kids? Ferchrissakes, the trailers were violent and coarse enough that I’d have gotten my kid outta the theater, but it went downhill from there. I don’t have kids and so it’s easy for me to say, “Have half a brain before exposing your kids to this stuff.” Anyway, that’s enough moralizing for me.
The biggest disappointment of the afternoon was that the trailer for Apocalypto actually looked pretty good on the big screen. This bummed me out because I won’t give money to a production by Mel Gibson. Also, I’m not sure if there are subtitles in this flick, but there should be because it’s awfully tough to figure out the Mayan term for “sugar tits.”
It’s off to Orlando for me. Not sure what book I’ll take with me. Gringos was boring, compared to the other Charles Portis books I’ve read. I’m thinking of just reading some long-form comics for the next few weeks, till that new Pynchon novel comes out. If you have any suggestions, make them in the next 8 hours.
Congrats Amy! I like those little guys. They remind me of the teeny Smart Cars in Italy. The only problem we had with a small car over there is that, loaded down with four people and impossible amounts of commodity purchases made by my gay friends, we could barely get up the hills on the way to Bologna and everyone was passing us going approx. 195 miles an hour. That said, you can park them in a shoebox!
Happy travelling, Gil.
The problem with a car like that is that hitchhiking clowns get really mad if you refuse to pick them up.
Gil did you see the Borat box office? The number was about right (mid-20s) but it only opened on 850 screens! It’s hilarious that Snakes On A Plane would actually end up having a major box office impact, but on someone else’s film as its tanking obviously kept someone from opening Borat in another 1000 theaters.
Even if Movie Borat isn’t as funny as HBO Borat, at least Cohen didn’t sell his character to an American like Gervais did, so we’re spared Dane Cook’s Borat.