Sasha Stone

This interview with Mike Bay popped up on my favorite gossip site. Supposedly he said about Megan Fox’s comment that Bay focuses more on the special effects than on the acting:

“Well, that’s Megan Fox for you,” Bay tell the Wall Street Journal. “She says some very ridiculous things because she’s 23 years old and she still has a lot of growing to do.

“You roll your eyes when you see statements like that and think, ‘Okay Megan, you can do whatever you want. I got it,’” he goes on.

But that doesn’t mean Bay thinks the same way.

“I 100 percent disagree with her. Nick Cage wasn’t a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck. before I put him in Armageddon. Shia LaBeouf wasn’t a big movie star before he did Transformers — and then he exploded. Not to mention Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, from Bad Boys,” he points out.

Bay thinks Fox could be a little more grateful, though.

“Nobody in the world knew about Megan Fox until I found her and put her in Transformers,” he says. “I like to think that I’ve had some luck in building actors’ careers with my films.”

He’s right about Megan Fox, no doubt about it.  She’s smartly building her career on the outlandish things she says in interviews, a la Jolie.  BUT when Bay says that he “made” Nic Cage and Ben Affleck one has to laugh.  Nic Cage wasn’t a big actor??  Rumble Fish, Valley Girl, Raising Arizona, Peggy Sue Got Married, Moostruck, Wild at Heart, Honeymoon in Vegas, Leaving Las Vegas (for which won a goddamned Oscar) were all before The Rock.

I think Bay meant to say: Nicolas Cage’s career didn’t “dive into the crapper until I got a hold of him.”

And as for Ben Affleck…Good Will Hunting was before Armageddon – but I suppose one could make the ludicrous argument that Michael Bay “made” Ben Affleck – you know, if you wanted to bathe in that delusion.

The fact remains that Michael Bay’s films make money almost by default; they are each and every one of them, with the possible exception of The Rock, terrible, awful films.  I couldn’t even make it through the first Transformers and I’ll watch almost anything.  Fox is right about the special effects; they are the only things that work in his films.  If there happens to be good acting it is because he chooses good actors to work with.  Sometimes.  Maybe?  Or is it just a lucky fluke?

I learned a lot about cooking on our recent trip to Yosemite.  The first thing I learned was that fruit doesn’t travel well to the Sierras.  Hard fruit, like apples or oranges, maybe green-ish bananas – but if you’re doing tent camping, not backpacking, not in a camper or a winnebego or pull-out trailer, you’ll have to put your food in either a cooler or in the bear locker.  If it goes in the bear locker it bakes all day long in the hot sun.  If it goes in the cooler it sits in cool water for a lengthy period of time.  Peaches, apricots, cherries were rotten by the third day.  It’s tempting to get them but think about storing them.  The other thing is, you don’t do a lot of snacking – you eat three meals and that’s pretty much it.  If the meals are filling you won’t need anything more.

Here is one dish I cooked – a chicken dish with some sort of Indian sauce, like a korma or something – I don’t even remember.  I sauteed onions and garlic before simmering the potatoes, carrots and chicken in the sauce.

The kitchen situation and the bear locker.  And that pineapple was toast by the third day:

Our sleeping arrangements on the first night (we had a great site – the next day we had to move to a more crowded, less pretty site for the remainder of our stay – you can’t have everything!

Here is our second location kitchen set-up (photo by our friend from Florida, Robert) – the pancake batter is just waiting to spill over, ain’t it?

The bottom line here is that if you’re cooking for others, especially a kid, you have to think about what you’ll be doing and when.  Having a lot of extra fruit around is a waste of money and, like they say in The Edge, what do we die of if we’re stuck in the wilderness?  We die of shame.  Shame that one doesn’t have the smarts to plan ahead and thus one buys a ton of fruit that then ripens and rots.

Of course, if you’re actually “camping,” as in – it’s just you, a burner, a sleeping bag, a small tent and the great wide open you’re going to need a lot less.  Doing the 1950’s style of tent camping, however, requires planning.  When I was a kid my sister and I took camping trips every summer with the Birdsalls.  They had the camping thing down.  I will always be amazed at people who do things well, whether it’s something small like keeping the kitchen floor clean, or something big, like planning a camping trip with lots of kids along and having it all go off without a hitch.  I’ll never be that person.

AwardsDaily is back as a Twitter account…for anyone who’s been following the drama.  Tech support responded at long last.

I just clicked on someone’s blog and I saw that they have implemented something like I have on this site, a little widget to announce their Twitters, or tweets, to their readers.  Trouble is, they use their Twitter mainly to link back to the things they write about on their blog.  This is redundant and absolutely the wrong way to use Twitter.  If you must post your tweets on your blog, make sure they illuminate your life in a real-time way.  Otherwise, you are spinning your wheels and wasting your time.

A great way to use Twitter is illustrated on the Pioneer Woman’s blog.

I have decided to not wait around for Twitter to fix the problem and have instead started up a new, temporary username.  What a nightmare, though.  My followers may never find me again.

http://www.twitter.com/oscarwatch

It is fun using Oscarwatch again, however briefly.

Finally, after days and days of no response from Twitter, I tried their support site, Getsatisfaction.com via this site. This is what I wrote:

I have built up a following on Twitter. I am a website owner and have been enjoying Twitter for quite some time. Recently, Google flagged my site [awardsdaily.com] as having a virus — so Twitter acted in kind. And they have suspended my account — after several emails and a phone call attempt, Twitter has completely ignored my requests — and it looks as though they will only allow me to cancel my username, awardsdaily, and start a different account. It’s really sad and depressing and, I must say, a broken element to Twitter. I know we live in a time when the individual isn’t so important as the overall traffic and usage; the internet has obliterated good customer service for the most part. And since Twitter is free they probably don’t care whether one person is having problems or not. This will catch up with Twitter eventually — how hard can it be to simply unsuspend someone’s account?

Is there nothing I can do about this? I suppose there is nothing I can do but I thought I’d give this one last chance. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll have to quit Twitter altogether because this is something fairly horrendous. Even Google acted swiftly to remove the virus warning. Facebook is easier to contact.

I even tried calling Twitter’s phone number in San Francisco.  They sent me through their robotic routine, “visit our help site online.”  Like I didn’t try that already?  I then tried to get through to their communications department, to alert them that I was planning on writing a column about how impossible it is to get through to Twitter and why, at some point in the near future, the jig is going to be up on Twitter if they continue such lousy customer support.  Yes, it’s like tilting at windmills.  I totally get that.  On the other hand, how can one just stand by?  On the other end of the “unique vistor” and the user impression is an actual person.  Short of giving up on Twitter entirely I am not sure how to move forward…

One of the things I loved about being in Yosemite, other than it being the cleanest place on earth, was spending face time with my daughter.  I spend a lot of time with her but not enough time “with her,” really listening to her and hanging out with her, giving her my attention.  Because there was very little contact with the online world I had the opportunity to truly unplug.  I will probably do this every year I can in order not to miss the raising of my only child.  It’s been a great ride so far, the best thing ever in my own life.  I adore her.  I admire her.  I respect her opinions.  I was kind of ragging on our traveling companion, Robert, who is an old friend from the net.  Emma was always defending him.  It was a sweet thing to see.

Bird Watching

Rafting down the Merced river

More pics after the cuts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just Jared has the pics.

Not quite sure what Lindsay Lohan is doing with herself these days or where she thinks this will all lead.  My advice stands: get thee an education and get it fast.  Being the “it” girl lasts two seconds and then you’re done.  Perhaps it has something to do with the contrived nonsense surrounding Megan Fox, a very lame wanna-be, and Diablo Cody who is trying hard to sell their upcoming movie, Jennifer’s Body.  So Cody says about Fox:

“So many actresses in Hollywood are just these little coat hangers who want to be America’s sweetheart.

“Megan has no such designs. She’s a badass, she’s a maverick, she’s not interested in pleasing people. She does her own thing.”

The screenwriter has also revealed that Fox was the only actress who was considered for the lead role in the upcoming teen-horror comedy Jennifer’s Body.

She added: “I’ve seen a lot of men with that kind of swagger. Maybe it’s time for the ladies to burn some bridges.”

Funnily enough, I’ve seen Fox in real life a couple of times and she really is a little coathanger.  There is no swagger there.  It seems to come alive on camera and she looks good, it’s true.  But she borrowed this from Angelina Jolie who has figured out that it doesn’t last.  But back to poor Lohan.  I’m wondering if she’s not aiming to be in the same class as Fox with all of this dark eyeliner and sex hanging out.  She just turned 23.  It’s time for her to take a good look at where she is at 23.  She’s going nowhere fast.  She ought to enroll in NYU and get her degree so she can put some substance into that head.  Either that or she’s headed for reality-TV, Playboy or complete obscurity.

Twitter and Google have me running scared.  Recently, there was a web-wide virus attack where my own site had some weird code in it that alerted Google.  So far, so good, right?  You don’t want a virus attacking your own computer via a website.  But once the virus was cleared up and removed and even Google removed the warning, Twitter continues to leave my account suspended.  It’s the most frustrating thing ever.  I even navigated through their bizarre contact area in order to ask them (very nicely I thought) to remove my “suspended account” warning.  The lesson here is that the bigger these websites get, the bigger Google and Twitter get, the more control they have over everything and everyone.  Beware, folks.