Andy Gapin

Not a bad little show last night. I thought I was going to be short on music to play, but things ended up working out perfectly. Though, I feel like I was a little too bothered by the grammatical error in the song title for Kathryn Calder’s “A Day Past It’s Prime.” At first, I thought it was just wrong in our system, but the wrong form of ‘its’ is there on the back of the CD case as well. Oh well.

With all the feelings of wanting to finally throw in the towel and retire from college radio lately, it was nice to head into the studio last night and have a good show that I had fun doing. Maybe the week off helped.

• The Love Language – Anthophobia – Libraries
• Telegraph Canyon – Shake Your Fist – The Tide And The Current
• Villagers – Ship Of Promises – Becoming A Jackal
• Wolf Parade – Two Men In New Tuxedos – Expo 86
• The Black Rabbits – Hurry, Hurry – The Black Rabbits
• The Like – I Can See It In Your Eyes – Release Me
• Teenage Fanclub – Into The City – Shadows
• The Beauties – Devil Do – The Beauties
• The Streets On Fire – Chadwick Shut Up! – This Is Fancy
• Kathryn Calder – A Day Long Past It’s Prime – Are You My Mother?
• Fjord Rowboat – We Both Know – Under Cover Of Brightness
• White Fence – Destroy Everything – White Fence
• Kacey Johansing – Photographs And Letters – Seasons
• The Lincoln Bedroom – Help Me Get Back Into This Heart Of Mine – Broken Record
• Clean Girls – Siesta Siesta – Summer Camp

Source: 90.3 The Core

Over the weekend, my fiancée and I went to her hometown’s pool so she could get a little swimming in. I’m not a big swimmer myself, but she was on her high school and college swim teams. You could say she likes it. Oddly, I’d actually never seen her do laps in a pool before so it was a first for me. Anyway, I took a few pictures.

Yes, another collection of photos of my fiancée on here. What can I say? I like taking pictures of her and it’s either her or the cat. You guys gotta choose. I’m kidding, I take plenty of pictures of other things, it’s just these are my best two subjects. I wasn’t going to post these ones, even though I like them a ton, but these might be the first that she has actually approved of so I had to put ‘em up.

I’m still trying to work out the best way to handle putting my pictures online. I might start using my Flickr account. I put a lot of photos on Facebook and put just about everything I want to share on here, but I might move to a three-pronged approach. Flickr could be good for just putting them out there in the expected place where more people are likely to see them. This blog is just kind of a catchall for anything me that I feel like sharing and is longer than 140 characters. In all reality, I’m hoping to change up the layout of this blog to make the photos more of a separate thing.

Simply put, Inception was mind-blowingly not mind-blowing.

And that is an overwhelmingly good thing and is actually what’s genius about the movie. The idea itself, being able to go into another person’s dreams isn’t anything groundbreaking, new, or far out there for a movie. It’s been done before plenty of times, hell, there’s an entire series of films based on this very concept. Inception has been hyped for being mind-blowing on this front, but I don’t think it is. What makes Inception different though is that Christopher Nolan actually thinks it’s a good idea to take this all the way to the dream within a dream within a dream within a dream level. That’s kind of a ballsy move if you actually care about people being able to follow what’s going on.

That many levels of dreaming isn’t the genius part though. What is genius is how simple and easy to follow all of this was. I’ve seen many movies try to get half that complicated and fail miserably, becoming a convoluted, confusing mess. Inception is none of that. You can follow everything easily without feeling like things have been dumbed down for you. That’s what’s so amazing about this movie. What makes all of this possible is that there is a lack of the unnecessary. Each dream level is only as complicated as it needs to be and we don’t spend much time in most of them. They’re also very different setting-wise, making it easy for Nolan to move back and forth between the levels freely to gives us a glimpse of what each character is up to. Additionally, nothing is left very long without any explanation, the audience is never left more than a few seconds or a couple of minutes without understanding what’s going on. Background info is given as it’s needed instead of making us wait forever just to understand a scene that happened earlier in the movie. Yet, somehow enough secrets are kept to keep the audience engaged. The balance was damn near perfect.

The story itself is only slightly above average, homedude just wants to go home and see his kids and can’t let go of his dead wife. Nothing we haven’t seen before. There are a few twists, but by the time they unfold, you’ve already had it figured out for quite some time. This is all good enough, but not the selling point of the movie.

Leonardo DiCaprio leads this film very well, but that shouldn’t be much of a surprise, he’s one of the most talented actors out there. Ellen Page seems good enough, but as much as I love her, I feel like she only took this role in an attempt to try a more serious and less cute role after the last few flicks she’s been in. You know, to try to break away from the typecast she’s going on right now. It was nice to have Cillian Murphy be a part of this, I’ve been wanting to see more from him and he was well-suited for this film.

Inception brings with it a few pretty neat action sequences that weren’t expected. There’s the standard car chase, gun fight type stuff, but then there’s this awesome anti-gravity fight with Joseph Gordon-Levitt being a bit more badass than I ever expected him to be. Awesome.

There’s a lot of hype around this movie right now and I’d have to say that it lives up to much of it. This film really shouldn’t blow anyone’s mind, it just shouldn’t. But it will suck you in, if  you let it.

Rating: A-

PS: I feel like I’ve been giving a lot of As lately. Too much?

Many that know me know that I’m into spicy foods. I’m not like my co-worker who has been known to put sriracha in his cereal, but I do like spice. When I get Thai at the place near my job, I ask for the spice level at a 6. The scale only goes to a 5. To be fair, their spice is little less than some other places, for example, the place near my fiancée’s parents’ house is so spicy that I struggled through a “medium” the first time I went there.

At any given time, we have fresh jalapenos, pickled jalapenos, sriracha, an assortment of hot sauces, chili powder, chipotles, and more available in our kitchen and we make great use of them. And I’m always looking to try something new, I have a friend that is often giving me bottles of Indonesian hot sauces, most of which are delicious.

Anyway, last night, I ate the spiciest dish I’ve ever had. My fiancée made a curry stir-fry with udon noodles. This thing was intense. The recipe called for red chilies, but the grocery store didn’t have any so we got a bag of Jamaican hot peppers instead. These things are supposedly 100,000-350,000 on the Scoville scale– for reference, a jalapeno is 2,500-8,000. So yeah, these guys were hot. She just threw one of the red ones in and that was enough to whip us around a bit. The meal was absolutely delicious, but my mouth was on fire. For the first time ever, I needed to drink a bit of milk to save myself.

It was awesome.

I’m definitely hoping that she’ll make it again, but that was a seriously intense meal. I’m actually pretty sure that I farted flames earlier this morning.

You can read more and get the recipe over at her foodie blog, FoodosaurusRex.com. The photos above and on her blog are mine.

It’s been happening more and more lately, but I had to skip out on the radio show last night. The Funhouse kids, CJ and Dan, that generally follow The Playlist these days covered the extra hour. Maybe the fact that this is happening more often now should be a good indicator that it’s time to move on. I enjoy doing the show–once I’m actually doing it, anyway–but it seems that a lot goes on on Wednesdays that I have to skip out on because of it.

Anyway, I ran a 5k in Downtown Westfield last night instead of doing the show. It was humid, but luckily, the heat died down a little before the race started. I found that, just like the 4 mile race I ran on the Fourth of July, the humidity killed me. I had trouble breathing and felt like I was going to throw up for the last mile. It was not my best race, but I beat my time from the same race last year by about 15 seconds and it was my third fastest 5k ever. I should probably be pretty happy about that. Though races like this make me ask myself why I do them and why I like to run, but that’s for another post that maybe I’ll make soon.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this post, but my iPhone 4 battery life was seriously impressive last night. I got home with 33% left after having the phone away from a charger for 15 hours. My usage over those 15 hours breaks down something like this:

• About 3.75 hours of reading articles on Google Reader, using Twitter/Facebook, reading other websites. About 80% of this was over 3G
• About 30 minutes of GPS use during the race to track my progress and time. Then I uploaded the route to mapmyfitness.com using their app. (I did not take 30 minutes to run the race, I fired it up about ten minutes early).
• Listened to music during the race
• Snapped a few pictures and emailed them off
• Updated 5 or 6 apps that had updates available
• Made a 2 minute phone call
• Kept push and WiFi turned on all day

I’d say that’s pretty impressive. My old 3GS and 3G would not have been able to pull that off.

This past Friday, I ran through Central Park in NYC in just my undies and it was kind of awesome. It was part of the annual Jamaica underwear run to kick off NYC Triathlon weekend. The event was a lot of fun and attracted over 500 people, many of which were still very well covered. The average person wore something in the realm of boxers, a speedo, sports bra, boy short underwear, or even actual running shorts (only allowed for the women). The more adventurous wore panties, regular bras, or briefs. Some had full on costumes. I chose to wear a pair of black briefs and didn’t feel too underdressed.

The run itself was just a fun 1.7 mile almost loop through the middle of Central Park. There was a clock, but no time keeping or bibs, this was just for fun. My fiancée and I made the mistake of keeping our bags with us though which made running a bit of a pain in the ass. Since we had come in from Jersey, we had our phones, wallets, and such on us and didn’t want to check that stuff. I also had my camera on me and wanted to keep it on me to take pictures. It’s funny, I only did a light jog and was just in my undies, but I was still dripping sweat. It was quite hot out.

The run was a lot of fun though and I’ll definitely do it again next year…hopefully, next summer will be nothing like this one though.

I got a few good pictures, but I also felt a little weird walking up to strangers and taking their pictures. I know it’s perfectly legal, but I don’t want to weird people out too much. I’m sure this is something that I’ll get over the more I do it though.

I felt like there was a complete lack of steam to the show last night. I got hit with a pretty bit wall of tired about an hour before the show and never recovered. I was having a lot of trouble fitting songs together all night and the entire show felt directionless. I guess it happens sometimes.

• Born Ruffians – Oh Man – Say It
• Fjord Rowboat – We Are On Time – Under Cover Of Brightness
• Wolf Parade – Cloud Shadow On The Mountain – Expo 86
• Here We Go Magic – Old World United – Pigeons
• Wintersleep – Black Camera – New Inheritors
• The Drums – Need Fun In My Life – The Drums
• Telegraph Canyon – Welcome To The Night – The Tide And The Current
• The Young Veins – Maybe I Will, Maybe I Won’t – Take A Vacation!
• Deer Tick – Twenty Miles – The Black Dirt Sessions
• Careful – Scrappy – Oh, Light
• Kacey Johansing – Oh, Brother – Seasons
• Like Bells – Sea Salt – Palma
• Vic Chesnutt – Feast In The Time Of Plague – Skitter On Take-Off
• Pearly Gate Music – I Woke Up – Pearly Gate Music
• Gogol Bordello – When Universes Collide – Trans-Continental Hustle

Source: 90.3 The Core

It’s true, I’m 27 and had never been to Medieval Times. To be fair, I grew up in South Jersey and without one nearby, Medieval Times just isn’t the kind of thing that us kids did much growing up. This was all rectified thanks to my good friend Jenny’s 27th birthday.

It’s not a cheap place to go with tickets costing over $60, but they do offer huge discounts for buying more than one at a time. We got nine tickets at once which broke down to only being $33 each. I can deal with that.

Everyone always told me that Medieval Times is just like in Cable Guy and it’s true. It’s fun and entertaining, even though it’s little more than pro wrestling with swords and horses instead of metal chairs. Our knight got his ass kicked which was disappointing, but it’s okay, it was fun while it lasted. The food was decent though. Or at least, plentiful. I was more than full afterwards and, while it wasn’t the best meal I’ve eaten, I couldn’t really complain.

I took over 200 pictures while we were there thanks to putting my camera into continuous mode, but it was very hard to get good ones. I put the camera in fully manual with my 50mm prime, but we were back pretty far so my zoom was lacking a little. It’s a super cheap lens so the autofocus is slow and rather crappy. It was actually useless at that distance so I switched to manual focus for the entire night. Including the roughly 190 shots I took with manual focus that night, I’ve probably taken less than 400 total in manual, so I’m still practicing that quite a bit. I had a few that were right on, a bunch that were close enough, and a few that weren’t even close. It was a lot to juggle at once in fully manual with the action moving around so much and such difficult lighting conditions.

Oh well, it was a fun night though. Below are the best few shots.

Despicable Me is one of those movies that gets totally over marketed for so long that by the time it finally comes out, you’re mostly just relieved the marketing will die down. I was sold on this movie about 3 seconds into the first trailer I saw for it, but spending the last few months seeing this previewed before every movie I’ve seen got a bit annoying. Lucky for everyone, Despicable Me delivers in a serious way.

Despicable Me is a fun movie that entertains, but doesn’t stray too far from standard ideas. Coming out two weeks after Toy Story 3 hurts it a little, though pretty much any movie would have trouble following that up. Still, Despicable Me is a great movie that I really loved a lot.

I like that things moved along quickly, but throughout the entire film, I felt like I had already seen it and already knew the characters. I even had a nickname for the littlest girl that Gru adopts before even seeing the movie. I had been referring to her as Boo.0 as she reminded me pretty heavily of Boo from Monsters, Inc. She’s super cute.

The minions are pretty entertaining, but I’m still not quite sure what they are and I’m curious as to what they were saying throughout the movie. During the credits, I used the Best Buy Movie Mode app on my iPhone to translate, but sadly, the app doesn’t work throughout the entire movie. That’s probably a good thing though, no one needs a theater full of people holding up their phones during a movie.

If you want to root for an evil villain and not feel bad about it, Despicable Me is for you.

Rating: A-