Owenskie's Blog

Call me a decrepit geezer. I have just watched the first season of Heroes after months of its release. I have got to say, it certainly did come as close as it can get to reality. Something about Heroes and the characters’ everyday life and activities make it so life-like and not quite at all. What I am trying to say is that, at one point or another and not just in a nerd’s fantasy, we all have wondered what it is like to have superpowers. Through Heroes, we see it transferred unto the screen but in a more realistic fashion. If you have had the desire to stop time, wouldn’t you have done the same thing as Hiro Nakamura? Somewhere along the way, you forget X-men and you still remember them with this show. What makes me say that? Well, like all stories, there are villains and there are plots of world domination or doom. That’s when you know it is along the coast of comic books heroes, other than the suspense and drama television series brings. If I would produce a knock-off of Heroes, I would give the characters superpowers to do incredible things in the office. If this doesn’t say ordinary, everyday life, I don’t know what else is there. One of the characters would have Xerox vision, reproducing business documents with one look. The phone operator would have the power of suggestion that will enable him or her to put callers on hold without any trouble. And of course, there’d be a super-villain who continues to cloak himself, stealing office supplies stealthily and bringing them home. One day the stapler, next the office chair. Imagine too if these office superheroes had business cards. I wonder now what those business card designs would be and what would it say? Hmmm….this has got to be the hardest part. Yeah, it wouldn’t be a top-rated show that’s for sure. But it still is a hilarious thought, even for a second. I am getting way too ahead of myself. If I had superhuman powers, on one hand, I think I be like the other Heroes characters that were killed by Sylar. Moving and living our lives to the fullest. I don’t think I would be the type who would band up with the others and form some sort of Justice League. Besides, in this day and age, life’s biggest threats aren’t in the form of one person. It is many things that continue to change our world, and maybe even us. And with all the things that we have to wake up to everyday, aren’t the drudgeries of life already enough? This is what makes Heroes quite addicting to watch, especially the first season, for as humans we are already troubled by the seemingly small things that occupies our everyday lives. What more of the notions of power, responsibility and the seemingly inescapable fate to do something for the world? Although it may seem like I am overly obsessed with this topic, I don’t know if I will be a part of Heroes following. Reason one, I am reading too much into it and it can be a bit frustrating to predict what’s going to happen. But then again, who is Mr. Linderman?

If you have been a couch potato at one point in your life or another, you would have watched too many television shopping spiels on air. I say this because you may find yourself accompanying your mother or grandmother to trade shows where they showcase many new and exciting house hold items that are just quite life-changing. Oh, aren’t you just brimming with excitement? Of course, you cannot just leave Ma or Granny to do the shopping. I mean, with the many times you’ve “accidentally” come across shopping networks, you would know better to identify the real deal from the cheap knock-offs or imitations that may be lurking in other trade show booths. Why is this a sudden concern for me? Well, trade shows for the uninitiated and for those who have a knack for buying things off the bat are under the mercy of really persuasive sellers. You have got to have a strong disposition. And well, heck, hard earned money is still money. You have got to put it to good use. Besides, if you’ve watched too many television shopping networks like your truly, sometimes it is worth to pay that product a visit in the trade show. Trade shows are like candy stores. There are so many lights and bright, vivid, trade show posters that call your attention left and right. Now, there are plenty of tradeshows out there. There are ones for apparel, antiques, fishing, jewelry trade shows, car expos, sporting goods and so many other. There are even trade shows for printing companies who do talk about trade shows and trade show poster printing displays. Talk about redundancy huh? Anyway, to see is to believe. This is the motto of trade shows. If you want to do a little shopping on the must-have items right now, this is the place to be because they have got lots of freebies. Other than this, if you are planning on buying some heavy-machinery, like the king of all kings of barbeque grills, well, a trade show is a nice place to look into. It is nice to see successful products that literally swipe the grime and dirt off the floor. With one clean sweep, lipstick, soil, baby food and so many other staining objects are polished off. However, this does not leave me too impressed to make me want to go clean up my room everyday. I have also seen not just mops that make cleaning easy, but gadgets that just says you are just plain lazy. I mean, c’mon, why would you buy an electric can opener anyway? Is it that darn difficult or you’re just opening so many cans a day? Kitchen products are fun. Knives that can cut through leather and tiles are the closest thing you can get to testing out Ma’s knives. If you do that in real life, you’d be in for a lotta trouble. Anyway, you get to see, smell and taste food. The latter is the best one there is. Other than that, there are lots of items that can pique your curiosity but then again you don’t need. Watch where your money goes.

Is it programmed in the human design that makes us want to collect things? Honestly, I know you that you know someone who is in to collecting things, be it tea pots or t-shirts or even old cameras. But then again, just look into your own drawers and closets, and you’ll probably find a collector in you. If you open drawers, there would be an assortment of silverware. If you look closer at your dog, you may find a number of clothes you bought for your darling Chihuahua. And if you have some spare change like these famous celebrities, you can splurge a little (Okay, a lot) on whatever it is you fancy. Take for instance the collection of Celine Dion. She has, give or take, a 1000 pair of shoes! Jerry Seinfeld spends his well earned money for the syndication of Seinfeld on air by buying Ferraris. And you can call Sarah Michelle Gellar a bibliophile for collecting books, vintage books that is. Collecting things may be just a simple fancy or a really passionate, and sometimes, a costly hobby. So aside from the garden variety hobbyists - stamp collectors, coin collectors, baseball card collectors and comic book collectors, there are still a wide range of people who collects all sorts of stuff. Just take a pick from the vault of Ripley’s or the Guinness Book of World Records and you can find an astonishing number of people and the things they collect. People collect hundreds of thousands to even millions of an assortment of things. There are tea bag label collectors, airplane sick bags, Chinese menus, cigarette rolling paper booklets, bottlecaps, and of course postcards. These record-holders keep an amazing number of collected items. Yet there are yet puzzling and even surprising figures to digest. Now, I have read somewhere that almost 5 billion postcards are sent out by the Japanese all over the world during New Year. I mean, with this impressive number of postcards, I bet the postcard printing companies over there are rich. If you were a postcard collector, you’d probably be in heaven. I mean, even if only a fraction of those postcards are unique, you will be adding up at least a hundred thousand of new postcards to your collection. What a huge stack of postcards that would have been. And so, from the mundane to the luxurious and top of the line collections, people find collecting things to be of great pleasure. There is no way of explaining it. If I were to start my own collection, it wouldn’t really be for a world record. It can be for utter fancy or sentimentality. However, if I want to be original, I just can’t think of anything else to collect with all the assortment of things people have thus far – from oddities to rare, vintage items. Imagine, people have kept the records for having the most number of chocolate wrappers. In the other end of the spectrum, I can’t very well compete for the largest collection of diamonds, yachts, painting and wine. I should probably start with something small and specific, after all, that is today’s trends. Would anyone care to contribute to a polka dot tie collection? How about to an unused, red, nail lacquer bottle collection? Non-blue ribbon winning recipes? 99¢ candy bars? Now, what would your own collection be?

I never had an inkling how color posters were made. If they were made through huge printers, how big would a printer get if it had to print huge billboards. I have this certain gullible quality about me that either makes me stupid or slow, and on very limited occasions, cute. On fewer occasions still, I can be right. There’s gotta be a huge printer for color posters printing. But enough about that. I’m talking about color posters because it brings me back to memory lane. No, I am not regressing to a particular era – not the 70’s or 80’s or even the 90’s. I’m slowly walking back to my old self where I’d rather watch movies than buy myself lunch. It was better for me to go hungry after saving up my lunch money than miss a good movie. All I cared about was consuming movie after movie. I would go early to the cinema and study which ones were coming out next. I used to stare at those colorful posters when begin to rank movies in my must-see priority list. I think I even used to rank the poster’s design back then. I watch an assortment of movies. If you share my sentiment for variety, you know what I am talking about. I can enjoy a feel good movie, a kung fu movie, a what is now known as chick flick, zombie movie, romance, and of course comedy. I remember the stories. I remember the words. I, of course, remember the most powerful lines like the pledge of allegiance. “Why should we sip from a tea cup, when we can drink from the river?” This is a line from a Steve Martin’s movie entitled Roxanne. The character played by Steve Martin was named CD Bales. It was a character rooted from Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Hence, the same initials. If you know what MFEO stands for, I’m sure you’ve also watched Sleepless in Seattle where the Meg Ryan – Tom Hanks tandem brought in a wave of love spell, and of course, the big bucks. “MFEO? Made for each other. It’s cute. It’s like a little clue.” And I am sure you remember the poster as well for this one. “Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires ... How avant-garde!” This is a personal favorite from the adaptation of Anne Rice’s book, Interview with the Vampire. Kirsten Dunst was so young in this film and now when you watch her on the silverscreen, she’s all grown up. My appetite for films in those days were almost unquenchable. Those colorful posters were just appetizers. I don’t know what suppressed this appetite, was it the DVDs? The Tivo? Hmm… I think I’m going to start devouring those posters once again to get me back in the loop.

I’m the type of person who likes paper and pens, but mostly paper. I like having notebooks and drawing pads and an assortment of other things that would hold my precious (for me at least) scribbles, sketches, doodles and what have you. I like running my hands on them and feeling the softness and strength of it both at the same time. Paper has this quality that can immortalize you. Call it superstitious. Call it quasi-philosophical or romantic. But if there’s any way, anyone can immortalize oneself, it is through print. If, for anything else, I would want nothing but high-end paper to immortalize my sketches, doodles and what have you. Specifically, I would have it done by nothing less but the best printing press available. Yes, I may obsess about such, about paper products. I obsess about it because there’s nothing like looking at a clean paper that has quality and character. There’s nothing like seeing your attempts in the best possible conditions, albeit, paper products. It’s a luxury that I can afford. While people pay thousands of dollars for shoes or bags, computers and other gadgets, I can invest in something that is purely for my own private pleasure. And even if I did get the chance to put up my own prints on my walls, wouldn’t it be something to have prints in gallery-like quality? I have been longing to put up my own pictures on the wall. And no, I am not being narcissistic. I am a dabbler of many things. I dabble in art, literature, music, and photography. I am also a self-proclaimed gourmand, explorer, diver and so many others. And so, I have been endlessly scheming or planning which print to put up, which space, under what lighting conditions and so forth. I am getting quite ahead of myself here. But to surround yourself of such lovely things, through simple means such as prints, I think, is a joy only a few like me can understand. I can feel proud without being too full of myself by just looking at what I have managed to accomplish. Even if these prints are or will be for private viewing only (again for my own pleasure), these are not merely decorations. These prints will be reflections. These prints are validations. These prints can and will immortalize the things I have seen, tasted, felt and held in this waking life.

If Britney Spears were to have a business card, what do you think it would look like? If Michael Jackson has one, would it say King of Pop? I can just imagine if Michael Jackson were to have one, there’s be just his feet, moonwalking across the business card in signature black pants, white socks, black shoes. You get the idea right? I have stopped to ponder on these thoughts as I attempt to come up with a brilliant business card design. It should be something that is simple, yet captivating. It would be unique, trendy yet elegant. There are so many adjectives I can use to describe what I would want, but the problem is, I just can’t think of any. Right now, I am too busy of dreaming up of dreams, of other people’s business cards. Imagine if all sorts of famous celebrities had a business card, what would it look like and what would have been written down on it? Funny, this one just came to mind. What if today’s celebrities associate themselves with their most famous movie or television series? Wouldn’t it be quite hilarious if it said Teri Hatcher, Desperate Housewife? Ah, my imagination is just running away with me. And we haven’t gotten to the material or the appearance of these business cards. Maybe Paris Hilton would have perfumed her business cards with her own scent. Maybe Donald Trump would include a little tuft of hair on the business cards, showing everyone his famous hairdo. (You know. It’s the one similar in children’s book where a patch of material would imitate the texture of a cloud? Well why not the Donald’s hair with highlights, right?) I tell you what, with these kinds of ideas, these surely won’t turn out like any old cheap business cards. I mean, if you can afford a foil stamping made out of 24karat gold, who wouldn’t do it right? There are various kinds of clients coming from the rich and famous. You can even go all out and add some diamonds in there to make your business cards truly and literally sparkle. Hmmm…may be we can even put in a small chip in the business card so when Diana Ross hands out her business cards, it’ll automatically sound off with “It’s my turn…” or Celine Dion would belt out “My heart will go on and on….” And oh, I can just imagine all the things you can do with your business cards. Glitters, sequins, scratch n’ sniff and all that to make them stand out. Imagine if you had George Clooney’s business card and it had scratch n’ sniff in it, would that just be a fanciful idea. Think of how musky his cologne might be. I bet it’ll be one business card you wouldn’t want to part with.