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for memorial day, we went on a little road trip to big sur. it was fun. and then james made this movie.

big sur 2008 from james lee on Vimeo.

Tonight, Steph and I went to check out the screening of Fully Flared, put on by the San Francisco Film Society at Mezzanine..

It was one and a half hours of some pretty sweet kick flips and other skate tricks with kickass cinematography and a really, really good soundtrack.

For me, it was a little long.. I mean, I have a short attention span and all, but maybe it’s cuz I don’t skate, but after about an hour, I got a little antsy. I mean, I don’t remember how long M.A.S.H. was, but that film left me wanting more, but I suppose that’s cuz I can’t really get enough of watching bikes.

That said, the opening of Fully Flared was truly awesome. M83, explosions, and jumping off stuff. Good.

meredith and steph drove up north to look for cows.

cow hunting from stephawu on Vimeo.

this is my first music supervision “credit,” woohoo! the track is “Big Sky Lullaby” by Wylie & The Wild West Show — yay music.

mer & steph frogger from sinned on Vimeo.

We had dinner at Great China on Saturday before Hersh’s housewarming. Great China is hands-down my favorite Chinese restaurant in the bay area, and basically every time we go, we order pretty much the same thing.. Double skin salad, Peking duck, and Crab with egg… Mmmmmm.

Here’s a video of what it felt like to be the lazy susan at our table:

great china dinner from merpeck on Vimeo.

Why is it called a lazy susan? I mean, are Susans statistically inclined to be more lazy than other individuals? I mean, Shel Silverstein had a fantastic poem called “Lazy Jane” that went like this…

Lazy
lazy
lazy
lazy
lazy
lazy
Jane,
she
wants
a
drink
of
water
so
she
waits
and
waits
and
waits
and
waits
and
waits
for
it
to
rain.

Why’d susan get singled out?

Hmm.. “Lazy Jane” seems like a good band name…. I’ve added it to my list.

spinning from merpeck on Vimeo.

As promised, I finished putting together the video from the Thailand Trip.. Ok, it’s been like almost 3 months ago, but hey.. it’s finally done..

thailand 2007 from sinned on Vimeo.

mahna mahnah from sinned on Vimeo.

dance party from merpeck on Vimeo.

This weekend was absolutely gorgeous here in sf.. With temperatures reaching into the 80s, it was like the second time in the 10 years I’ve lived here that I actually got to bust out the shorts..

So, today, Andy, Meredith and I went over to Alameda to check out the monthly flea market. Didn’t find anything great, since browsing was cut short due to a massive infestation of gnats that seemed to plague the market (maybe it should have been called a gnat market)..

We then grabbed Bailey and headed for the dog beach at Fort Funston.

And then, Andy made a video of the lovely day. Yay.

Niiiice. The first four minutes of Borat are on YouTube now..

Disco dance!

Woo.. So many good movies I wanna see lately… The new Will Ferrell movie, Talladega Nights, looks pretty damn dumb funny, and then Snakes On a Plane opens next week.. and in November, Borat!!

And I still have to get my arse to go see Pirates of the Caribbean… jeez, if only the weather would stop being soooo nice, I could catch up on some movie watching.

I saw the movie An Inconvenient Truth tonight at a movie night that Willo organized… I knew really very little about the movie going into it, except that Al Gore was in it and that it was a documentary…

Here’s the trailer:

Word of warning though.. the trailer makes the movie seem like it’s gonna be SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY exciting (your ticket buys the whole seat, but you’ll only need the edge).. but, watching Al Gore talk about global warming is kind of like a very well done college lecture. His presentation was so slick, and Apple must be ecstatic over the amount of product placement they got in the flick (which fits perfectly with their iconoclastic, leftist, I’m cooler than you image). I do think it was a slightly alarmist, but, as he said in the movie, people need a jolt in order to actually do anything about stuff. I mean, ice caps melting, hurricanes, floods, disease, drought and war… Kind of fitting that I saw this movie on 6/6/06… Repent! The end is nigh! But yah, I do recommend that you see the movie since it definitely has encouraged me to do some more reading on the whole issue, and that’s good… As far as alarmist documentaries go, I much prefer Michael Moore’s work, cuz at least we’d be laughing through most of the movie.

Anyway, this movie reminded me that once, in a previous life, I had made hybrid cars and really wanted to make the world a better place.. Hmm. I mean, once in awhile, little glints of my lefty self surface, like when I bought a tree in England a few years ago. But.. I’ve been really feeling myself growing quite libertarian (I think I’ve been reading too many economics books) the past few years.

So, I’ll have to do some more research on this whole thing… I’m not convinced that legislation is necessary to combat this problem — I think that if enough people are made aware of the issue, they’ll start to choose carbon friendly choices… Or, maybe economic pressure (like from rising gas prices) will be enough to make an impact.. Anyway, I’m rambling, but I do feel a little good about the whole thing cuz at least my commute to work doesn’t contribute to global warming..

Oh yah.. in the trailers, there was this movie about this girls’ high school basketball team that looked really good, The Heart of the Game that looked really good.. opens next Friday!

Ok.. this rocks.

Woo! Who likes dancing? And.. as long as I’m on the YouTube kick.. here are a few more…

• Robot Dance — wait for the 2nd dude.. INSANE!!!
• Best Music Video EVER — I heart aerobics.
• Some French Girl Singin — Yoooohooo!

Wahoo. This is boom goes the dynamite stuff fo’ sho’.

Since I love making movies, here’s the august roadtrip movie (45mb download) from my latest trip for your viewing pleasure.. enjoy.

Alan, Sarah Jane, Kane, Shingo, Andy, and I rode in Sunday’s Scooter Rage 19 here in San Francisco… Our little scooter gang is growing into a healthy group now… The ride started out at First Kick Scooters in SOMA, and made its way all through San Francisco — the ride was called the “Three Golf Course” ride, though I counted that we passed five: McLaren Park, Harding Park, Olympic Club, Lincoln Park and the Presidio…. It was a gorgeous day, absolutely perfect for a scooter rally.. All in all, there were about 100 scooters on Sunday.. and no real hassles (although I heard somebody had a crash, so that’s no good)..

I made a scooter movie for you all to watch.. enjoy.

Whoohoo. finally made it back to san francisco… i blew out a tire about 30 miles outside of bakersfield, which kind of sucked, but at least it didn’t happen in the middle of oklahoma..

I did actually end up driving all the way up to Guymon, OK — the little tiny panhandle bit of Oklahoma — to see what was up there. Turns out.. there’s nothing. But I did get to cross the Oklahoma-New Mexico border — which I believe is something that only a small handful of people accomplish. Wahoo. Not that it’s actually *that* exciting, but hey, I did it.

So yah… somewhere in Arizona, I looked at my rear tires and noticed they were completely bald — I did notice that the car felt a little squirrely lately, but I just dismissed it and hoped that I would be able to make it home on the bald tires. No rain in the forecast, so i figured it’d be ok to drive on slicks, right? Well… the right rear tired decided to give up, so it blew up. This is the third tire I’ve blown out (1st on this car though) — I think I’m either not good at rotating my tires regularly, or I drive too hard…

So… I also made a movie of the roadtrip with some of the video footage I took.. I have a higher resolution one, but I don’t have anywhere to host the 50mb file.. maybe I’ll torrent it or something… It captures over 5,000 miles of driving in a little over 3 minutes…

so i watched the game at kezar pub yesterday.. we got there at 11am (4 hours before kickoff).. we got ourselves a sweet table in the middle of the action, and gorged ourselves on buffalo wings and coors light in an icy eagles bucket. my cousin stephanie was the only patriots fan in the whole establishment, so while she quietly cheered her team to victory, the rest of the bar was full of rowdy hope…

it was a great game.. and i think the energy of the bar was captured in this video.. aj’s friend vince took the movie footage, and i assembled it with muvee, of course..

good times.. good times.. aj says that there will be a rematch next year.. same teams, and the eagles will emerge victorious..

so i found this awesome movie producer software, muvee.. it basically automatically produces a movie with any video clips and images you have — setting it to the music of your choice. sooo cool!! it supposedly picks out the “important bits” from the footage that you’ve given it…

it seems to do a pretty good job — it looks like it takes hours of work to make this video, but it only took about 10 minutes.

yang in asia 2004 video