I really don’t have a lot to say about the Casey Anthony trial itself, except to mention that the “not guilty” verdict isn’t really much of a surprise to me.  It’s been clear for quite some time that even if things had gone the other way, it would have been handily overturned in appeals.  As disappointing as it may be, this was the obvious outcome, so I find myself rolling my eyes a bit at how stunned and baffled the populace seems.

Oh well.  What’s done is done, and I can’t say I ever cared too much about the trial in the first place, outside of a natural empathy for the poor little girl.

The part I’ve found myself most disgusted by over the past several months, however, was not the possibility of Casey Anthony being released.  It was the investment of energy by so many people into this case that’s bothered me.  For Christ’s sake, the woman’s only defense was to claim that she didn’t kill the baby, but rather simply tried to make it look like a murder after she accidentally drowned.  If those are the only two options, it all comes down to a matter of deciding just how depraved Casey Anthony actually is.  That’s what this was all about…

Yet, this was the case folks like Nancy Grace and Jane Velez-Mitchell felt was important enough to practically spend a 24-hour a day news cycle on.  How many resources — be it time or money — have been diverted into this one case where there was never any chance of recovering a living Caylee.

People like Nancy Grace like to pretend they do it all because they care so much about the victims, but meanwhile, they’ve ignored all the opportunities they’ve had to use their notoriety to help missing children who are still out there at this very moment.  Children who may actually have a chance to be found alive if only we reach them quickly enough.  But unless these hypothetical missing children come with a sensational and strange story, Nancy Grace doesn’t give a shit.  Unless it has that “I can’t believe this could happen to a middle class white girl!” ring to it, Nancy Grace doesn’t care.  Unless she can come up with some (in her mind, at least) clever nickname for the accused, Nancy Grace doesn’t want to be a part of it.

I’m not saying the court case wasn’t interesting in and of itself.  But the problem comes along when we begin to believe that weird stories like the Casey Anthony trial are worth more than bizarre footnotes in our overall news experience.  When we allow ourselves as a society to get sucked in to these types of stories, at the expense of any actual news, there’s something wrong.  When we turn the death of a little girl into a media circus, where viewers camp outside of courthouses and run screaming gleefully to get tickets to view the proceedings, we’ve lost sight of what’s actually important.

I guess the overall point I’m trying to make is that I hate Nancy Grace.  I just hope the echoes of her shrieking “TOT MOM” every 5 seconds will fade from my memory sooner than later.

I really can’t stand Domino’s Pizza these days.

I don’t mean the food…although, let’s be clear that their pizza does indeed suck.  The old “recipe” tasted like cardboard and chalk, slathered with thick tomato juice.  Their #newpizza — as they so hiply refer to it even when not on Twitter — is a step up, but it really only elevates their pizza to the level of “slightly less intolerable.”

But it’s not the food that bothers me.  What really gets to me is the fucking attitude of this company.  They’ve actually managed to find a way to be arrogant about how humble they supposedly are.  At times it seems like they literally want a medal for finally deciding not to make terrible food.  Domino’s has basically become the incorporated version of a high school bully who’s still insecure about being picked on as a child.

Perhaps the worst part of their new marketing strategy was the ad they released last March.  They had some smug bastard standing in front of a courthouse telling us about the time Papa John’s referred to their slogan as “puffery” when “challenged” in court.

So, let me get this straight.  You’re referring to a 14-year-old frivolous lawsuit Pizza Hut filed in order to prove to us that the Papa John’s slogan is, in fact, an opinion and not some indisputable fucking law of nature?  No shit, assholes!  All I take from the ad is the fact that Domino’s Pizza loves seeing the legal system abused for stupid crap like this.  I haven’t been this annoyed by a Domino’s commercial since…well, the Noid.

At this point, I don’t care if Domino’s Pizza digs up the Ark of the Covenant and inside, next to the ten commandments, they find Jesus Christ’s personal pizza recipe.  There’s simply no way I’ll ever order from them.

(Green Men tag:  Jealous Domino’s executives)

I present this video to you not only because the person in it is a good friend of mine, but because the cupcake involved is one of the leftovers from Quin’s first birthday yesterday.

Today we have another classic Kitty moment. One of my favorite Webcam Classics, this was shot when we got our youngest cat, Jack. This little kitten of ours was a pain in Kitty’s ass for a long time, but as he matured, they became good friends.

In honor of the late Kitty, I’ll be posting some of my favorite saved moments over the next few days. This first one comes to you from the Webcam Classics series. Kitty was always a real sport when it came to film making.

I remember when you could win a free soda on the underside of a bottle cap.  There was something nice about taking your first sip on the way out of the convenience store, turning the cap over and winning something.  It was a fun and instant gratification, even if the prize was so very minor.  Even better were those few times when you were able to chain together multiple wins in a row from one purchase.  It was like being the Jesus of 20 ounces.

I’m not surprised these promotions don’t exist anymore.  It must have been a pain for the store clerks having to store up and send off all those unwieldy little pieces of plastic.  Still, I hate the version that came after.

Nowadays, bottom of the cap games consist of strings of nonsense code that we’re expected to type into a website somewhere.  Basically, they turned “Sorry, try again,” into a convoluted process of being advertised to.  And free soda isn’t hip, apparently.  Now we win ringtones and shit.

Only tangentially related, I miss Bottle Caps candy.  Especially, the grape and root beer flavors.  I wonder if I can find a box somewhere.

Cheating on your girlfriend is awesome!

Haha…women are stupid and will fall for anything.

Our employees will be working on Christmas…and they’re gonna really fucking hate it.

Entering the gas station this morning, I was immediately assaulted with extremely loud, boisterous laughter.  The offending party was a gentlemen talking — practically yelling — into a cell phone’s wireless headset while making his morning coffee.  I made it a point to mentally take note of his side of the conversation.

“It’s almost the weekend.  Pretty soon I’ll be like, ‘It’s Miller time!’”

A pause, some laughter.

“Yeah, then I’ll be like, ‘Less filling.’”  A shorter pause then quickly, in premeditated retort, “Less filling!”

More raucous laughter.

“Your tighty whities will be even whiter when I’m done with you.”

Another pause.  The employee, scanning my Coca-Cola, cocks his head slightly and flicks his eyes momentarily towards the man.

“I’ll paint your booty like a [undecipherable].”  I left the store wondering what would have possibly ended that simile.

In the interest of full disclosure, I can’t say the idea behind The Social Network really thrilled me from the start.  There aren’t a whole lot of stories I’m less interested in knowing about than that of the founding of Facebook.  Considering the praise this movie was getting from seemingly everyone who had ever heard of Facebook, though, I held hope that it would surprise me and somehow make me care about the life of Mark Zuckerberg.

The Social Network essentially has three subplots running simultaneously.  Subplot A is where the meat of the movie takes place.  It follows Mark throughout the creation of “The Facebook” and its eventual rise to prominence.  This is the only part of the movie that actually feels like a movie, but even then it’s only barely cobbled together in a watchable form.

Jesse Eisenberg is a capable actor — even if he is a bit of a poor man’s Michael Cera — and he handles the role beautifully.  The problem is that we’re never given a chance to really care about the motivations of any of the characters.  As often happens in biographically based films, it quickly jumps around from each perceived important moment to the next, leaving large chunks of time up to our imagination.

In The Social Network, we’re constantly being told what happened when time wouldn’t permit actually showing us.  People walk into rooms and say things like, “What’s going on here?”  Sean Parker, Napster co-founder, is apparently a paranoid dude, but the only reason I really gathered that is because Eduardo flat out tells us that he’s paranoid.  In fact, Sean’s character was badly handled overall.  He’s essentially the movie’s “bad guy,” but his indiscretions are handled like asterisks in the story.  Getting caught with a bunch of underage kids snorting cocaine was quickly glossed over as if the movie was saying to us, “Oh, by the way…Eduardo was right about this guy, but we only had a moment to tell you that, so here’s him sobbing in a police station.”

If they had focused strictly on bettering this part of the movie, it might have been salvaged, but instead, they spent half the movie on subplots B & C.

Subplot B is sprinkled throughout The Social Network, occurring in flash forwards where we see Zuckerberg sitting in boring conference rooms talking to boring lawyers.  This is one of the laziest possible ways to pad a movie like this.  It’s basically like a voiceover, except worse, because we’re forced to actually watch as people tell us exactly what’s going to happen in the next scene.  More clever deviations between the stories being told in these depositions and the realities we see afterwards could have given these scenes a place in the movie.  As it stands, we simply end up watching everything happen two times in a row.

Subplot C starts when Zuckerberg originally meets with the Winklevoss twins.  In what seems like a minor footnote to the story, they present an idea to him about an exclusive social networking site — an idea he then runs with to create Facebook.  However, entirely too much time is devoted to these characters for the rest of the movie.  About every 10 minutes, we’re subjected to a scene depicting their side of the story, but every single one of them can be boiled down to, “Grr, we’re so mad that Mark stole our idea, but one of us doesn’t want to sue him so we won’t.”

In both the climax and the end of their storyline, we discover that…well, that they finally decided to sue him.  This is, of course, something we already knew because we had been forced to watch their depositions for the past two hours.

If the filmmakers had cut out a majority of the courtroom scenes and all of the Winklevoss’ storyline, it would have given this movie a chance to flesh out the potentially interesting parts.  As it stands, The Social Network is a frustrating, slowly paced movie that seems to drag on for three hours, despite it’s 121 minute running time.

Final Verdict:  The Social Network sucks.