Movie Review: (500) Days of Summer

(500) Days of Summer starts out with two characters who have extreme and warped ideas about love, due to pathological childhoods.[1] Summer believes there's no such thing as love—it's a fantasy. Tom believes in love at first sight and "the One". Summer tries to be rational and explain away her behavior when anyone else would say they were in love. And when things start looking too serious, she jumps ship. Tom will put up with just about anything because he stubbornly believes that it must all work out in the end. He is also clingy almost from the get-go. Eventually they find each other and the resulting collision is pretty much inevitable. The more Tom tries to solidify their relationship, the more Summer squirms to get away.[2]

Movie Review: Mars Needs Moms

When I added this to my Netflix queue (and even after I'd watched it), I had no idea that it was the biggest box office bomb of all time, unadjusted for inflation.[1] It was also the biggest critical and financial failure of any film attached to the Disney company.[2] It's based on a book by Berkeley Breathed (whose comic strips, Bloom County and Opus, I've never enjoyed) and was directed by Simon Wells (some of whose other films I have enjoyed, including An American Tail: Fivel Goes West, The Prince of Egypt, and The Time Machine). It was released the same week as Battle: Los Angeles [3], which may have contributed to its financial demise.

Matt Gets Published! II

Over a year ago I was part of a paper that was published [1] about a genetic tool developed in my lab that can delete a bacterial gene at the time of my choosing. That paper didn't count towards the two publications I need for my Ph.D. because I wasn't the first author (i.e. I wasn't the one who did most of the work). Well, about a year ago I had enough data to publish an article as the first author. But the editors of the first journal we submitted it to didn't feel like it was important enough to appear their publication, so we had to resubmit to another journal. This time the editors thought it was worth their while, so they accepted it after requesting a few more experiments. It appeared in the most recent issue of Molecular Plant–Microbe Interactions.[2] In fact, they liked the article so much that they asked us to submit some images for the cover of the issue.[3]

How to Finish a Bag of Chips

Sometimes a bag of chips is so delicious that you want to eat every last morsel. But you eventually reach the point where there are only crumbs left in the bottom. Getting those crumbs out can be a hassle. Sometimes you tip the bag up only to have the crumbs cascade out and land in your hair, in your ears, in your eyes, in your clothes—everywhere except in your mouth. Other times you hear the crumbs coming down, but they never come out of the bag. You try to straighten out the lip of the bag [1], but to no avail. Reaching in and grabbing the crumbs is messy and time consuming. But despair not, I can show you a quick and easy way to get at those tasty little devils.[2]

The Solipsist

You may recall that about a year and a half ago I participated in an online fiction contest, held on the website Writers on the Loose, that was held by the President Emeritus of the BYU 38th Ward Book Club. My submission was called Quaver.[1] Since then Jonathan, tired of the squabbling on the site, has ended his membership. But the biannual contest lives on, now overseen by another member of the site, who goes by the handle 'deep water'.[2] I haven't participated in the last few contests, but the theme this year actually incited me to write not one but three stories.[3] The suggested them was "…something fictional on the 2012 world-ending scenario; it could be in the realm of science fiction, crime, comedy, etc." When I first approached the prompt I wanted to have the world end, but not in a way that has been done before (e.g., nuclear holocaust, devastating disease, alien invasion, zombies, asteroid, the Rapture, etc.). This is what I came up with.

Retail Hell

A few weeks before the deadline of the Writers on the Loose short story contest [1], I was talking with my friend, Jonathan, on a website, called the Pedestrian, where former members of the BYU 38th Ward Book Club get together. He works at a Stein Mart in the men's clothing department and sometimes has less-than-savory interactions with the customers.[2] He'd just been through one such trying event and he wrote, "I was an inch from knocking over a rack, throwing clothes around, and quitting. No one should have to put up with retail hell." I responded, "Except…GENGHIS KHAN!"[3] This then inspired me to write a story about just that: Genghis Khan ending up in retail hell—all for Jonathan. And while I was at it, I decided to give it a 2012 twist so that I could submit it to the contest.

The Really Real Clowns

For my last entry to the Writers on the Loose short story contest [1], I wanted to go with something that was surreal. Enter the clowns. The really real clowns, that is. I started out by simply writing down every random thing that occurred to me.[2] Then I weaved them together and turned some of them into recurring motifs. I wanted the idea to be that something happened to drive everyone mad. But due to that very same madness they wouldn't be able to communicate effectively what had happened.