Everyone thinks their friends are funny. That’s usually part of why you’re friends, because your senses of humor match. But some of my friends’ blogs make me think, “I bet other people would laugh at this, too.” So here are some posts that I believe you will enjoy, as penance for not having a “Snide Remarks” column this week (or next week, or the week after).

Chris Clark is very funny. He will pretend not to care that I said that, but secretly he is delighted and wants more people to tell him he is funny. You might enjoy his recommendations for making church Christmas parties more fun, and his feelings about his wife about to have a baby (key line: “WE ARE NOT VIETNAMESE”), and his not-at-all-bitter thoughts on some negative reviews he recently received. Oh, and DO NOT MISS “Eventide Masquerade,” which is his answer to the vampire novel “Twilight.” Actually, you will not go amiss if you just start at the beginning of his archives and work your way forward.

His wife is Lisa Valentine Clark, who has been one of my best friends since we were in the Garrens Comedy Troupe together way back in ‘96. Lisa and I are very close. While she was pregnant this last time, I helped her by gaining as much sympathy weight as I could. We joke about me being the father of at least one of their children, but secretly we all wish it were true. I liked her story about seeing Maroon 5 in Las Vegas (her brother is the guitarist), and her charming thoughts on parent-teacher conferences, and an amusing story involving their daughter Phoebe. (Please note: Despite having been an actual English teacher at one point, Lisa doesn’t always spell words the right way. This, and the fact that she doesn’t give a rat’s arse, is part of her charm.)

I’ve known Craig Bates since high school. I believe I am partially responsible for getting him into acting, so if his wife is reading this, I apologize. Craig can rant and rave like nobody’s business, and he is not afraid to use a swear word here and there if necessary. Enjoy “What’s Wrong with Corporate America” and “Life Takes Visa.”

Then there is Emmie. Ah, Emmie. A “graceful beauty,” I once called her in a review of a stage production she was in. So true, so true. She is married to a guy named Steve that none of us have ever met, but we’ve seen pictures so we know he exists. Anyway, just as with Chris Clark’s blog, you would do well to just peruse Emmie’s archives (if you know what I mean). Among recent posts, I laughed at this one and this one and this one.

Ken Craig is another friend from the Garrens Comedy Troupe days. He lives with his wife and innumerable children in Las Vegas, where it is too hot to go outside eight months out of the year. He doesn’t blog very often, but when he does it’s because he has a topic that needs addressing. See “Dr. Schulze, I Presume” and “A Very Merry Christmas Movie.”

Here is a very level-headed, insightful article by David Wong called “10 Things Christians and Atheists Can (And Must) Agree On.” (It contains some PG-13 language and images.) At a time when there is increasing animosity between those groups, I find this attitude of “Can’t we all get along?” very refreshing.

Naturally, since the article is about finding common ground and respecting one another, most of the comments that people have posted in response to it are full of hostility and anger — merely proving one of Wong’s points, which is that there are a-holes in both camps who simply don’t want to understand how other people think.

What do Wayne Newton, Tony Curtis, and Clay Aiken have in common? Behold: Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians.

And below, fictional presidential candidate Kim McFriendly, a former Republican senator from the state of Heartland, offers her defense of Sen. Larry Craig in a CNN parody. (If you watch it and don’t get the joke, that means you somehow missed seeing this video a couple months ago.)

My friend Mike Russell couldn’t fulfill his normal duties as movie critic on KUFO’s Cort and Fatboy program Friday night, so I stepped in for the assist. The guys were broadcasting live from Portland’s Bagdad Theater in conjunction with their 11 p.m. screening of “Goodfellas,” and I joined them there on the scene to discuss “The Heartbreak Kid” (which is not nearly as good a movie as “Goodfellas”). A fine time was had by all. You can listen to the broadcast here. My appearance starts only a couple minutes into it, so you might as well just listen from the beginning.

I’ve joined Mike a few times in the past to cover films he hadn’t seen (the last time was in February), but this was the first time I’d gone solo, without Mike even there. I was alone with Cort and Fatboy! But it was OK. They were nice to me. I pointed out to Fatboy that he’s really not fat anymore, and he said he’s been losing weight, getting in shape, etc. He said his goal is to get so thin that “Fatboy” becomes an ironic nickname, like when giant guys are called Little John. Also, I finally learned his real first name. (It’s Susan. No wonder he prefers Fatboy!)

I am pleased to announce that, as part of my goal to write for every website on the Internet, I’m now on the blogging team at Cinematical!

Cinematical is an excellent source for movie news, with a couple dozen entries a day covering all manner of film-related items. I’m working specifically for the Cinematical Indie sub-section, focusing on independent films. Some of these articles show up on the main Cinematical page, but most stay in the indie section, with the cool kids.

Most of what I write for Cinematical Indie will be news-oriented, though the bloggers are encouraged to put a personal spin on it to liven it up. If you’re not interested in movie news, don’t feel like you’re obligated to read it just because it was written by me, is what I’m saying.

If you do want to keep tabs on me, you can bookmark my blogger page. It lists all the articles I’ve written for Cinematical.

(Likewise, for my stuff at Film.com, bookmark this link.)

For daily updates from the movie world, Cinematical really is a useful site, and I’m not just saying that because I write for them now. There are a lot of good writers there, and they save you the trouble of monitoring lots of different movie sites because they cull from them and report the best stuff anyway.

Hooray for fun new writing gigs! And hooray for having seen the last of stuff like this!

If you know anything about me, you know that I LOVE CRAZY PEOPLE. They are the spice of life. They make dull things interesting.

One of the craziest people I’ve ever encountered is Tim Nasson, whose awkward, poorly syntaxed writings appear at Wild About Movies. I first wrote about him last year when I told you how he’d been misquoting people he interviewed. Then, this past summer, I talked about his new trend of pretending to have interviewed people he had not, in fact, interviewed. Then I had to tell you about some funny lies he told about me on his site, and then I figured, what the heck, I might as well publish the e-mail correspondence I had with him. Why should I be the only one who gets to enjoy his hilarious delusions?

And now I am honored to report that Tim Nasson has posted a comment on this very blog! In the last entry I mentioned, another reader was talking about problems he’d had unsubscribing from Nasson’s mailing list. This prompted Nasson himself to chime in and post this:

you are such a [swear word]
hope you get burned by the FBI for harassing Wild About Movies
We have records of not only your IP address the 30 times you registered for promos but also your physical address, which you inputted into our system, 30 times. GoDaddy, and everyone else you emailed laughed when we provided them with ALL of the information and think you’d be better off locked up in a loony bin with Eric D Snider.

Check out his www.alexa.com rating - his site’s, then www.wildaboutmovies.com Don’t think any movie studio has called him lately, asking to buy his site. Nuff said. Anyone who reads this site is obviously pathetic, like poor little, or rather should I say, poor ugly Eric. I should add that he emailed me wishing me to die of AIDS. I am not stupid enough to post anything about his site on my site because, as you know, there is no such thing as bad publicity, and publicizing his name or site in any way would give him free attention.

Continue reading…

The man and knife in question.

The Derby Telegraph in Derbyshire, England, reports that a man got a 7-inch knife past the security checkpoint at Birmingham Airport, while his daughter’s soda was confiscated.

The man, Nick White, says he’s a construction worker and he forgot he had the knife in his pocket when he and his 13-year-old daughter went to the airport. He realized it was with him when he approached the security checkpoint and, not knowing what else to do (he didn’t want to just throw it away), put it through the scanner along with the other stuff from his pockets. And no one said anything.

His daughter, meanwhile, had her soda taken away due to the ban on liquids on airplanes.

Continue reading…

Mark Harris is by far the best of Entertainment Weekly’s three rotating back-page columnists. (Dalton Ross is too hipster-ironic-snarky, and why should I care what Stephen King has to say about anything other than books?) His entry in the June 1 issue is a prime example of his insight and intelligence. I nodded in agreement through the entire piece, and I’m not much of a nodder.

Entitled “Power to the People,” the column addresses this common Hollywood lie: “We’re just giving the people what they want.”

It’s the defiant lie told by those who want to pretend that their failures of ambition are your fault -— that because “the people” eat what they’re fed, they must like it. The moneymen behind Spiders of the Shrekibbean brag about meaningless numbers (Spider-Man 3 had the biggest opening weekend of all time!) and shrink from meaningful ones, like the fact that Spider-Man 3 cost more and will likely gross less than the first two.

Continue reading…

As foretold last week, there is no new “Snide Remarks” column today. You can well imagine my sadness over this fact. I’m on the road, on a bit of a “vacation,” you might say, except that I’m still doing some work. Just not “Snide Remarks.” So very sorry.

There probably won’t be one next Monday, either, but you never know. As I’m lazing about my parents’ house later this week, the mood might strike me and I might dash off an exceptionally witty bit of commentary. On the other hand, next Monday is Memorial Day, so not publishing anything would be a perfectly justifiable action on my part. It is all part of the mystery of being me!

I’ll still have some blog entries this week, more or less one per day as usual, so don’t forget about me entirely.

Finally, did you know that one (1) spider monkey weighs the same as 9.41 placentas? Or that it would take 720 giraffes’ necks to equal the Golden Gate Bridge? It’s true! These and many other important facts can be found at Weird Converter. Go amuse yourself there for a while.

While you weren’t looking, my brother and webmaster Jeff, acting more in his capacity as webmaster than brother, added a new little feature to the site. It pertains to links. Let’s say I was linking to XKCD, a very entertaining web comic that often deals with math and science and other matters of geekery. See that little icon next to “XKCD” in that link? That means that if you hover your mouse over the link, a small window will pop up showing you what the linked page looks like. Move your mouse away and it disappears. Fun!

What purpose does this serve? Almost none! But it’s nifty, so there it is. It’s only for links that take you away from EricDSnider.com, since we figured you don’t need previews of what other pages on this site look like. (They’ll look like the page you’re already on, only with different text. Duh.) And if everyone hates it, maybe we’ll take it away again. But everyone won’t hate it! It’s nifty!

Actually, it is useful when I’m linking to a few specific sites. If it’s an Amazon link, like this one, instead of showing you a picture of that Amazon page, it presents you with a text description of the item being linked. (Harry Potter 7, in this case.) It does the same for Wikipedia links, IMDb links, and probably some others.

Anyway, there it is, in case you hadn’t noticed it. Enjoy your mouse-hovering!

EDITED TO ADD: For those who do hate it, you can disable it simply by mousing over one of the links and clicking “Disable” in the upper right corner of the pop-up box. As long as you have cookies activated, it will remember to disable the feature whenever you visit the site.