The Big Sleep

Holy carp.

(This is not a typo; I meant to say "carp." It's an understated joke, see. Carp are funny, like ducks and monkeys. It's not like I said "holy crpa" - that wouldn't have been funny at all.)

Upon returning from work, I took a nice li'l nap. Until 10pm. Now I suppose I won't really go to bed tonight; I certainly don't feel like it.

Bodies are so weird.

A sucky masque

Users of Biore's pore strips derive a curious pleasure from slowly peeling off the stiff, dried paper and sticking their now-clean noses into the otherwordly stalagmites of oils and impurities these strips pull from god-knows-where in their skin. I like them myself, but they always seemed a little inefficient and overadvertised - they're small, pricey, and packaged like surgical equipment.

My friend Amy suggested I try this today: Queen Helene's Mint Julep Masque. It's available in most pharmacy stores for a ridiculously low price of $3.29 (8oz). It smells of creamy mint and looks like plasticized avocado butter; it's thick, dry, and almost acrylic-like.

As soon as you'll apply it, the minty, cleansing, sucking burn begins; it's no worse than weak mouthwash, so no worries. The masque dries in under ten minutes, and you can wash it off after fifteen. It doesn't exactly peel off, but it's not hard to rinse away either. I wasn't expecting much from the product since it looked too creamy to properly pull, but pull it did. My nose appeared cleaner than after using strips, and for once, the rest of my face got the same treatment. A little dry, but that's normal. The clean feeling is so strong, in fact, I felt like my feet had become smoother.

According to Amy, you can also use small amounts of the masque overnight, in particularly problematic spots. Queen Helene's says it helps with zits; drop some masque on one and let it dry overnight.

C'mon dad, gimme the Cars

If Pixar's Cars becomes the highest-grossing movie of all time, it will be well deserved. There - I'll set the tone for this review with a hyperbole, because I've just walked in from a lazy Saturday matinee screening, and it feels like the most awesomest movie I've seen. They may not make actual cars (ones that don't talk or go "tractor-tipping" for fun) like they used to, but I'll be damned if they ever made entertainment this amazing when I was a kid.

I know Cars is a piece of schmaltz, full of valuable lessons, harmless stereotypes, and puns (from verbal to visual to plotwise). But Pixar isn't trying to break new ground in children's writing or writing in general; they're just perfecting their American-born dream tales until they're so deliciously formulaic, you wonder why it's so hard for others to do it even reasonably well. Most formula movies suck; Cars is a volcano of fun, action, emotion, and pure love for the world. All that in a CGI world populated by sentient automobiles. Silly? Predictable? Childish? None of those labels matter.

It's getting so that every frame of their movies is freeze-frame-worthy; from the ridiculous - a "bomb shell" hot rod has a tribal "tattoo" above her, um, rear end - to the fantastically philosophical elements (I'm not kidding) such as mountains that vaguely resemble car parts. Our world wasn't shaped to look like it has our human forms in it, of course, but the only way we humans can relate to an auto-centric universe is by seeing it through their own eyes: in the sky, they see tire tracks. You want popcultural references that are far more Simpsons than - eck - Shrek? How about race cars sponsored by HTB, Hostile Takeover Bank. Throwaways jokes, all of them, and barely noticeable among the plot elements filling the screen for almost two hours.

You'll probably see every major twist and turn coming, but you'll stop trying to do so just five minutes into Pixar's best movie yet. They have not failed for as long as they've existed; all hail Pixar.