CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

In The Machinist, Christian Bale plays an emaciated machine shop worker who never sleeps and apparently also never eats. Bale is scary-thin here, and it’s not camera trickery. Throughout the movie he becomes thinner and more haggard, and near the end there are flashbacks to previous points in his character’s life when he had a more normal weight. These were filmed sometime before or after Bale’s dramatic weight loss, and the contrast on screen between the thin and normal Bale is almost incomprehensible.

Unfortunately, that dramatic weight change by the lead actor was the most interesting part of this film for me. The picture doesn’t suck, or anything, but it’s really just a trumped-up, big-budget Twilight Zone episode which would have fit nicely in a 60 minute running time. Unfortunately the picture is stretched out longer (and thinner, pun intended) than is necessary, which left me

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So, if you know what an exercise ball is (think like what you’d use in Pilates), you can start to picture this chair. It’s best viewed, here, on the manufacturer’s site:

http://www.gaiam.com/retail/product.asp?product%5Fid=95-1004

A coworker suggested this to me last year after I mentioned my back injury from a few years ago (bad disc, never healed) and my constant un-preference for 8 – 12 hours of computer work in a normal office chair. I hemmed and hawed for the past year about maybe buying one of these funky contraptions, and in the past month or two really seriously considered it after regular office chairs just began causing me too much pain during the day. I even managed to snag a spare “exec” office chair at my office to try and abate the back pain, but it was no better after a day of constant work at the computer

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I absolutely disagree with any offensive actions that purposely target innocent civilians. In America, the loss of an innocent life is perhaps the most tragic occurence imaginable. When a child is abducted, when an enraged husband murders his wife and children, when a drunk driver kills a family, or when a serial killer is on the prowl, we are all filled with great sadness for the victims, pity for their loved ones, anger at the perpetrators, and consumed by the need for swift justice.

One of the reasons that Americans cherish life so much is that life in America is a wonderful thing, for most of the people, most of the time. In general we have good health, long life spans, living wages, personal and religious freedom, humane working conditions, rich culture, freedom to travel, benign government, low crime rates, and are generally free from peril. In

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