Mercury Retrograde Meltdown…

I don’t know if I really believe in the whole Mercury in Retrograde mumbo jumbo that everyone’s been talking about for the past few weeks, but I do know that I have been breaking literally everything I touch lately.

Last Friday I dropped my iPhone — which, BTW, I have dropped hundreds of times! — and broke the LCD connector inside. The screen was fine with nary a scratch or crack to speak of, but all I could see were the dreaded vertical blue lines. Urgh…such a bummer! Luckily, Siri still worked, so, I was able to have her read me my emails and text messages and I even had her call people for me. Of course, I couldn’t hang up when the call ended, but, hey, at least my phone was still kind of moderately usable.

In the meantime I weighed my options with AT&T. I am about six months away from an upgrade, so, my pickings were slim and expensive and just thinking about it made my brain hurt. In the end, Mrs. Yeti and I decided to bite the bullet and lay out the cash for a new phone…and then, something glorious happened. I found a place called uBreakiFix in Glendale, and not only did they fix my LCD thingy, but they did it in an hour and fifteen minutes for $86. To say they saved my bacon is a serious understatement. Those guys rocked!

Of course, the iPhone was only one small part of the shit I broke last week. Aside from breaking two, count ’em, two of Greta’s water bottles, I also broke my longstanding contract with my internet provider Earthlink. I know, that doesn’t technically count as breaking something, but, let me tell ya, changing all of your shit over to a new email address is a freaking nightmare. Especially when you’ve had said address since 1998!

Yep, I signed up with Earthlink during the Clinton administration! Crazy, huh? Anyway, you’d be amazed at how complicated is to reset all your accounts on all your shit across the entire internet. I had to start a handwritten list after a while to keep track of it all and even that got confusing! But, at the end of the day, I emerged a much happier Gmail user.

Oh, and if I somehow forgot to send someone out there my new email address, don’t take it personally, I tried to hit everyone in my book, but, by the end, my brain was mush. If you really need to reach me, you can always comment here or text me or something. I’m pretty easy to find…

Anyway, hopefully all of that insanity is behind me now that Mercury has left retrograde or whatever, but, man…what a week. The Fourth of July weekend in San Diego cannot come soon enough. Seriously, bring on the booze and BBQ, baby!

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Oscar Nominations 2014

I know I’m a week late with my coverage of this year’s Oscar nominations, but, trust me, it’s been one hell of a week. Took a road trip to Northern California over the weekend and then came home to all kinds of insanity, so, please forgive me.

That said, this year’s crop of movies is fantastic! Although we have yet to see several of the Best Picture nominees, we did manage to watch screeners of most of the heavy hitters this season over the holidays — and I saw and loved both American Hustle and Gravity last week on the big screen — so, we’re catching up.

And while I’m pleased with almost all the nominees (except for the two acting nods for the overcooked melodrama of August: Osage County, which just might go on record as my least favorite Meryl Streep movie ever) the most exciting thing for me is that two of my all-time-favorite writer/directors of all time, Spike Jonze and Alfonso Cuarón, are finally getting some richly-deserved Oscar love from the Academy.

True, they’ve both been nominated before, but, never have they dominated the race as much as they do this year with their groundbreaking work on Gravity and Her. My dream outcome this year would be for Cuarón to take the directing Oscar for Gravity and for Jonze to take the screenplay award for Her. But, either way, I’m just happy they’re both in the running.

Speaking of writer/directors I love, I was very pleased to see David O. Russell returning to his goofy, idiosyncratic roots with the very cool American Hustle. The movie is big, messy and funny as hell and is probably Jonze’s stiffest competition in the Best Original Screenplay category, but, I loved it.

Also very glad to see Cate Blanchett snare a Best Actress nod and Woody Allen score his record 16th screenplay nomination for Blue Jasmine. But, my favorite nominee of all is probably Sally Hawkins who scored her first Oscar nomination for playing Blanchett’s sister in Jasmine. Blanchett deserves every award she’s won for the movie, but, without Hawkins beautifully-nuanced work to balance her performance out, Jasmine wouldn’t be nearly as good. Seriously, Hawkins is fantastic!

I also loved the fact that Nebraska scored so many major nods (go, June Squibb!) and that Frozen scored a Best Animated Film and song nomination for the epic “Let it Go.” We listen to that song daily in the car (I think I actually like it more than Greta does!) so, I’m dying to see which of the two versions will be performed at the Oscars: the rocking radio cut by Demi Lovato or the soaring Idina Menzel version from the movie. They’re both awesome, so, as long as they don’t roll out some other cheeseball to sing all the nominated songs, I’m cool.

Oh, and finally, in a year that has seen female employment rates in the industry drop to a 27 year low, I think it’s really cool that a female producer scored not one, but two Best Picture nominations this year. So, kudos to producer Megan Ellison for her fine work on Her and American Hustle.

To see a full list of all of this year’s contenders, click here.

Carmageddon…scharmageddon!

OK, so, we just drove the second leg of our trip home from Oregon — a nice little jaunt from my Aunt’s house in Sacramento to our place in L.A. — in the record time of eight hours. You know, give or take a few hour-long stops to let Greta run herself ragged at rest stops and such. But, even with the stops, we made great time…and why is that such a big deal you ask?

One word: Carmageddon! Yep, that’s right, amigos…the Armageddon of traffic jams! See, for the past few months, the news out here was predicting dire things for all of California (and Los Angeles in particular) due to the closure of a three-or-four mile stretch of the 405 freeway in Santa Monica this weekend. The reason? Caltrans was blowing up a bridge or something, but, from the sounds of the news reports, you’d think the world really was about to end.

Seriously, we saw flashing “Carmageddon Warning” signs alongside the freeway the minute we crossed the state line back into California. It was crazy, I mean, here we were almost the entire state away from the freeway closure and they’re telling us to “expect major delays”. Insanity!

Believe it or not, our beloved XM Radio even had a dedicated Carmageddon Radio channel (XM 140) with constant updates on the situation. It was hilarious. But the funniest thing was, there was no situation to report. That’s right, Carmageddon was another big fat Y2K.

I don’t know if it was the fear factor or what, but the freeway and every rest stop, burger joint and gas station all the home were practically deserted. Come to think of it, it was oddly Armageddon-ish, but, you know, not in a bad way.

So, if Carmageddon clears the interstate in peak travel season for our next road trip, I say we make it an annual fucking event. Whoo-hoo…Carmageddon 2012 4eva!