News You Can Bruise for 2005 May 21

(2) Sat May 21 2005 21:31 PST Xiao Loong And Thanks For All The Fish: Yesterday: date with Sumana. We went to Xiao Loong in West Portal, a tiny Chinese restaurant which I've always thought would be really classy just because the door is painted a really cool shade of red. Well, it is pretty classy. They use a great technique where they dip things into hot oil for one millisecond and then stir-fry. The sauces are good but the tofu was in big chunks that didn't absorb the sauce very well. We had to mash it up to make it not bland yet covered with sauce.

Video rental time! We got The Great Dictator and the original Ladykillers. The Great Dictator was alternatively hilarious and bizarrely sentimental. You don't see movies with names like The Great Dictator anymore. I miss that.

Oh, one weird thing about this movie. At the very very beginning there's a scene during World War I and Charlie Chaplin is playing a German soldier. So you think he's playing fake-Hitler, because of course real-Hitler was a soldier in World War I and used this to his political advantage later. But apparently this was not common knowledge in 1940, because in the first scene Charlie Chaplin is playing the other guy in the movie, the everyman barber who just looks like fake-Hitler, and it's incredibly disorienting. You're expecting in the first scene the kind of vicious anti-Hitler humor you end up getting later on in the movie, because c'mon this guy is Baby Fake-Hitler, but he's played as a garden-variety buffoon, the Tramp, not fake-Hitler at all.

We just finished The Ladykillers and it too was great. Truly this is the weekend we struck comedy gold. About halfway through I realized that Alec Guinness' mannerisms in that movie are just the same as Danny O'Brien's mannerisms. I expect the movie would be even funnier if you watched the whole thing imagining it's Danny O'Brien planning the heist.

I inherited a corduroy jacket from my grandfather, which I wear sometimes when I go out. It's great because it makes me classy. Without the jacket I haven't shaved and I'm wearing ratty jeans and a T-shirt I got for 25 cents at a yard sale. With the jacket I get let into restaurants.

Back to working on article.