Shorts, short shorts

(Summary of topics covered in this post: Peter Sarsgaard's short shorts, my legs and shorts, other people's shorts, and online window shopping)

The other day I was at Costco and it was very crowded, and the weather was quite warm as it is summer after all. Therefore, a lot of people had their legs out (as did I) in shorts. There's this one picture that I had seen of Peter Sarsgaard wearing quite short swimming trunks (I think they were) and of course the scene in that documentary where he was running and wearing short running shorts (my [women's] athletic shorts are that length!). So I had the length of shorts on my mind, and what better place to observe such a thing than a crowded store? 

I focused on men, not to ogle their legs in a lascivious manner, but to observe the trends in men's shorts lengths in the area where I live. I wonder if any of them caught me looking. I don't think I was too obvious, but who knows. I think the crowdedness maybe helped, in that there were so many people that it'd be hard to notice some girl staring at your legs, if you're a man wearing shorts. And it's not like I stared for particularly long at each person. Just long enough to register the length of their shorts. 

Anyways, by far and large, and not surprisingly, the most common length was knee length with slight variations in exact amount of knee covered. Some shorts were pretty much exactly mid-knee, others covered the entire knee, and so on. Let's say a knee is about 2 or 3 inches long, so that's how much variation in knee length shorts there can be. Depending on the angle I saw them from, some men I saw the front of their knee and others I saw (or didn't see, as it was covered by their shorts) the back bend of their knee, whatever the name of that thing is (if it has a name). Some men were wearing longer shorts that definitely came below the knee. A small amount of men wore noticeably shorter shorts, in that they came above the knee, leaving it fully exposed. I would estimate that the shortest shorts on men I saw were about 4 inches above the top of the knee, so, safely in the mid thigh area. I did not see any shorts on men short enough to rival the ones in that picture or documentary scene of Peter Sarsgaard*. 

I did happen to see women, of course, and unsurprisingly they were more likely to have their knees exposed and their shorts/skirts hit around mid/low thigh level. I myself was wearing my short shorts that come to upper thigh level. I personally don't wear shorts that are longer than mid thigh. Anyways, while we're at it, I'd like to lament the unavailability of women's athletic shorts with full sized pockets and without built in underwear. I would love to have more than 1 pair of those, which took me months to come across. It's not like there aren't other women who would like to wear shorts like that for activities (walking, just being out and about) where things won't 

* I am all for men wearing what they want to wear, which may, for some people (Peter Sarsgaard) mean very short shorts. But I also can't help laughing a little bit (endearingly, not in a mean way) when I look at pictures of Peter in those short shorts. I wonder if he has to shop in the women's section for them. 
They are probably about the same length (if not shorter) as my own athletic shorts. Although I guess things would look longer on me and shorter on him due to height differences. And he is a runner so I guess he knows best about what's good to wear running, which apparently in his case is short athletic shorts. 
Curiosity got the better of me so I'm now online window shopping for (men's) running shorts. I'm not sure of the exact length of a certain pair of shorts that I have in mind, as they are somewhere in the laundry and I don't feel like digging through all of it to find them and measure them. However, 2" to 3" is the usual inseam length, probably, on women's shorts. It looks like Nike sells them with the shortest inseam length available being 2" to 3". There are only 4 different styles that short (the most common inseam lengths are 7 inches or longer). Some of them cost $80, which I don't really understand - why are they that expensive? Are you just paying for the brand? These $80 shorts kind of look like they're modeled on a woman's body, since the legs are slim and hairless. Upon second thought, I guess the hairlessness makes sense for professional runners. That guy's legs have less hair than mine, at the moment. I would be more diligent about shaving, but I consider the number of times I've looked at other women's legs and noticed they were hairy, which is zero, so I think I can safely assume that the general public are not closely scrutinizing my legs to see if they're hairy or not. I don't think I have particularly obvious leg hair compared to some people.  

Wikipedia has a short little article about running shorts which mentions that longer shorts are less ideal for running because the larger amount of fabric gets in the way. I guess that makes sense. I don't really do running so I can't say for myself. 

Also

Movie review: Bridget Jones's Diary

As I mentioned in the last post, I'm going to now review the movie I just watched because it had Colin Firth in it and I thought it would be a good starting point (and for convenience, it was on netflix). 

It was your fairly standard romantic comedy, I'd say, although I don't really watch that genre very much. This is the first one I can distinctly remember watching but I may have seen one or two in the past that aren't coming to mind. As far as romantic comedies go, it was pretty solid. It seemed to fit all the boxes for the genre. I think it's one of Colin Firth's more famous roles in addition to Pride and Prejudice, which is probably his most famous role (like Titanic and Leonardo). 

Colin Firth looked intensely (sometimes) apprehensive for many of the scenes in this movie. Or maybe that's just his natural expression. Regardless, he looked fairly good and had fluffy hair, which is always nice. He kind of reminds me of a better looking (and British) version of Mark Ruffalo, minus the weird sounding voice that Mark Ruffalo has where it sounds like he doesn't move his tongue around enough in his mouth when he talks. Colin Firth has a soft, squareish shaped face and for reasons I can't really pinpoint I think I'd say he looks kind of endearing. 

Watching such a movie now kind of has me in a sappy mood, and so I wouldn't really mind watching other similar movies. It made me wonder if Peter Sarsgaard has ever been in a romantic comedy but I think the closest is the romantic but not comedy movie where he plays a British man. So that might be fun even though I won't get to hear his natural voice. From the images I've seen of it, it looks like it's a very visually beautiful movie - nice colors and all. And of course, Peter Sarsgaard is part of the "visually beautiful" description. Although I don't really understand why they didn't just cast an actual British actor in the role. There have to have been plenty of decent looking British actors they could have used. It would've been interesting if they had cast, say, James D'Arcy, you know?? He probably would have been perfectly fine (although very tall). 

I think there are two sequels to this movie, but only one of them (also starring Patrick Dempsey) is on Netflix. I'm not sure if I'll watch it quite yet as there are 7 other options on Netflix for Colin Firth movies and at least some of them should be good. I definitely think that Colin Firth could become a nice addition to my current favorite actors, each of whom are my favorites in different ways, if that makes sense. Vincent is my favorite in a different way than James who is different than Peter who is different than Leonardo. Maybe what I mean is that they are my favorites for slightly different reasons? Or not. Reasons: they are/were at some point good looking, they are good actors/I've enjoyed the things I've watched them in. That pretty much sums it up. 

P.S.: I was going to just tack this on to the review of whatever I watched next, so here it is. The other day I watched All the President's Men, which is a movie about Watergate and Journalism. It's kind of old but I thought that it might be interesting especially in light of recent events and also since I wasn't alive to witness Watergate for myself. It was more boring than I expected but it wasn't a total waste of time. I still wouldn't watch it again though. The thing I liked most about it was the set decoration of the Washington Post's office, where a good portion of the movie took place since the journalists it was about worked for the Washington Post. As far as journalism movies (that I've seen) go, this one I liked less than Spotlight (with Mark Ruffalo), which in turn I liked less than Shattered Glass (with none other than Peter Sarsgaard). Spotlight was perfectly decent, but I thought that maybe it could have been more compelling or something, a little bit. Maybe I should watch it again and see if I like it better the second time around. 

Colin Firth

I think I'm going to cinematically cheat on my favorite actors of James D'Arcy and Peter Sarsgaard, among others, and watch some (lighter) things that another actor that I think I may get interested in has been in. Said actor is Colin Firth, who in my perception of things is kind of like a more famous James D'Arcy and sort of like a British version of Leonardo DiCaprio or someone like that. More famous James D'Arcy in that they're both British and tall and good looking and have more or less similar accents. In fact, in this one interview of James, he mentioned that one role he got was because he was mistaken for Colin Firth in that the people had wanted "that Darcy guy" meaning Colin Firth (who played Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice) but whoever was in charge of contacting the actors thought they meant James D'Arcy. So there's a little trivia for you.

As for Peter, I am now in possession of a DVD of one of the movies he's been in, a fact about which I am quite pleased. I already watched this movie, but I enjoyed it and the DVD only costed $3.17 at a thrift store. I haven't yet watched the DVD, and I probably should do that eventually. It's a nice thing just to have.. maybe I'll even give it the honor of watching it on the big tv instead of my computer.

There are 9 different things on Netflix that Colin Firth has been in, which is quite a large amount compared to other actors I like. I think I'll start with a romantic comedy since I've kind of been wanting to watch some lighter stuff, meaning not the movie where Peter plays a murderer, although I do think that would be interesting. I'll get to that eventually, but for now, lighter stuff.

After I watch this thing, I'll more than likely review it as I do most of the other things I watch and consider worth reviewing.

Seth Meyers, Anderson Cooper, and Peter Sarsgaard

(alternatively titled 
For some reason, I woke up at 5:20 AM this morning. I wasn't tired enough to go back to sleep so I tried to find something to watch to keep me entertained. I browsed on Netflix but the one movie that I was thinking might be on there now, wasn't. I considered watching the West Wing, but I was more in the mood for something more non-committal at 5:20 AM. I remembered that a number of years ago (11, to be exact), Peter Sarsgaard (who else?) had hosted SNL so I decided to give that a shot even though I'm not really a huge fan of the show (although in the last few months they've been doing pretty well).

This happened to be the episode where Seth Meyers does his Anderson Cooper impression and says "You can see the news reflected in the shimmering blue pools that are my eyes," of which there is a short clip on youtube but this time I got to watch the entire segment. Upon googling that quote, apparently Anderson was unhappy with a more recent parody SNL did of him with someone else, but thought that Seth Meyers' was good. 

Among other people, at the time, the SNL cast included names like Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers, and Tina Fey. It was sort of interesting as by now those people are fairly well known for their work aside from SNL but I guess that's where they got their start. Currently, Seth Meyers is channeling Jon Stewart a bit in his Late Night with Seth Meyers show when he comments on all the recent political hoopla. In this episode, Amy Poehler played Hillary Clinton in one skit, which was kind of interesting in light of the more recent SNL portrayals of Hillary. 

Anyways, as for Peter, I think he gave a simpering performance (or maybe I was the one doing the simpering) and it was nice, as always, to hear him say things. I would watch a cereal infomercial for him, actually. Imagine that! If I ran SNL, I'd have him on again and have him do a cereal infomercial skit. He was a little chunky and lumpy (a synonym for "kinda fat") but not supremely so. Probably a lot of average everyday men out there have that type of figure. Pleasingly, he was also clean shaven. Anderson, for one, is pretty much always clean shaven (as he is a news anchor) and, to my knowledge, has never been chunky and lumpy. He works out and has pretty impressive arm muscles. (if you really want a picture, you can go look it up yourself since I'm too lazy to link one)

Surprisingly enough, this episode actually had a minimum of WTF-ery, which is mostly what I thought when I tried to watch SNL once a few years ago. I can't make this conclusion just off of seeing one episode, especially one with one of my favorite actors as host, which certainly sweetened the deal, but maybe SNL was better ~10 years ago (notwithstanding its recent resurgence). 

Some of the jokes/topics seemed interestingly prescient: Bill O'Reilly was mocked for sexually harassing women, there was a skit about the NSA listening to people's phone conversations, a part where "Al Gore" says that he should have been president, and so on. 

I wonder if Anderson will ever host SNL. That could be interesting. I'm not sure why he hasn't yet. Maybe he's just too busy or something.

Movie review: Black Mass

The mobster movie, I watched it, for reasons you probably can guess, and if you can't guess, what kind of a rock have you been living under and not reading my recent blog posts?

Anyways, let's get to it. It was a 2 hour long movie which is pretty average as far as movies go. I actually thought that this movie was a bit better than I was expecting. I thought I might be bored by it and I wasn't really. In the main role this movie starred Johnny Depp as the mobster James Bulger. First things first, he was definitely sleazy and creepy looking in this role, on top of how he already looks creepy even when he's not all made up to play the role of a mobster. Plus he was wearing these bug eyed sunglasses which didn't help things. I don't get why people think Peter Sarsgaard is creepy looking/sounding; he's perfectly normal and friendly looking especially compared to Johnny Depp in either this movie or just in real life.

It took place mostly in the 70s which was evident in the gaudy wallpaper, among other things. And the hairstyles, I suppose. I actually maybe wouldn't mind some 70s esque gaudy wallpaper if I had a house of my own.

There were a number of more or less well known actors in this movie. Obviously Johnny Depp, also Kevin Bacon, Peter Sarsgaard, Adam Scott (from Parks and Recreation), Benedict Cumberbatch, among others. Benedict is British so it was weird to hear him speaking with an American accent.

This is, to my knowledge, the second movie that I have seen that was set in Boston. There might be others (hmm, actually, I'm remembering another one right now) but the other one that came to mind was Spotlight, with Mark Ruffalo and which was about journalism.

Let's get to my thoughts about Peter's performance in this movie, which is the primary reason I decided to watch it (if you couldn't guess at the beginning of the post). He was only in the movie for a short period of time as he played a somewhat minor character. For those that love attention to detail like I do, he showed up around 45 minutes in and was out of the picture by the 1 hour mark. So he maybe had about 10 minutes of screen time in the entire movie. Spoilers ahead, to varying degrees. I was sort of surprised to see him in the role that he was in, which was someone who was kind of involved with the mobsters but not really that important or anything. He seemed out of place, so to speak. He looked comparatively naive and like he didn't belong associating with mobsters. In any case, (spoiler!!) after his little run in with the mobsters, he goes to the FBI to tell them about it but they don't believe him, even though what he was saying was indeed true. Before he does this, he does drugs as his character is a drug addict (or, as the AP Stylebook advises, someone addicted to drugs). So when it comes to him actually being in everyone's favorite location, the interrogation room, he is freaking out and looks rough because he is high on cocaine. Interestingly enough, he still actually looked fairly decent... he did not look super awful even with his face showing evidence of drug use. Unlike Johnny Depp, who did not look appealing for a single moment in this movie. His character was a detestable person. Who murders Peter's character in broad daylight with, say, 10 gunshots or so. It was something else. Which certainly did nothing to endear me to either Johnny Depp or the character he played. I don't think I'll be watching any other movies with him in them. Edward Scissorhands was good though, but that was before he got all creepy looking.

Even though Peter was only in the movie for maybe 10 minutes, I figured I could probably get a whole paragraph out about him and I did. So on to something else now. The credits sequence was interesting as it had pictures of the real people the movie was about, newspaper clippings, that kind of thing.

All in all, this movie was decent, and better than I expected (my expectations weren't super high) but I wouldn't consider it a favorite or anything. But it wasn't awful or a waste of time, so that was good.

Documentary review: America Divided

This isn't the main subject of this post, but awhile ago I watched a documentary on Netflix that I thought was really good and I don't think I've mentioned it here before. Although maybe I did when I reviewed The Thin Blue Line. If I didn't, I'm going to mention it now. It's called The Seven Five and it's about a corrupt police officer in the NYPD and I thought it was absolutely fascinating.

Anyways, onto the main subject. This again has to do with the process of watching the things that Peter Sarsgaard has been in. This time, it was part of a documentary series done fairly recently, in 2016. The series is called America Divided and it's about issues facing the United States in this day and age. There are a series of different issues covered, each by a different actor/entertainment figure over the course of 5 episodes. Each episode contains parts about multiple issues, rather than one issue per episode. So I watched the episodes that Peter was in although they also had other people as well. Among the issues featured in the episodes I saw were: the struggle of undocumented immigrants, drug addiction in the midwest, inequality/racism in North Carolina. These are all topics that aren't completely new to me; they were things that I'm more or less aware of, so that made me feel kind of superior and informed/unignorant compared to your stereotypical American redneck.. to live where I do, I think it's quite nice, in a number of ways; I would kind of say that we don't see the issues presented in the documentary series as prevalently as in other places around the country. Not to say they're completely nonexistent, but I don't think they're as much of a problem here as they are in other places. Those are just my thoughts on the matter, and if you'd like to correct me, feel free. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but as far as I'm aware, that's my take on it.

The issue that Peter's segment of the documentary covered was... drug addiction (imagine that!) in the midwest. So that was particularly interesting because it involves two things that I'm particularly interested in: drug addicts and Peter Sarsgaard. I have strange interests, I know. The issues were of particular significance to the people who covered them, so in Peter's case it was that apparently he has a cousin (presumably not on his in-laws' side) who is a drug addict and he said that he had been an alcoholic in the past. So yeah, drug addicts and Peter Sarsgaard. In the documentary, he talked to some drug addicts/users who ere in jail (a side note: I saw a news the other day about how the newest version of the AP Stylebook, a manual for how journalists are supposed to write, now says that drug addicts should be referred to as "he was addicted, people with heroin addiction or he used drugs." [from a Slate article about this which is the one that I read and learned about it from] Since this is just my blog, I think I'll eschew those guidelines.), and some police officers in Ohio, among others. It was interesting, I suppose. When each new issue is introduced, they have shots of the person covering it doing some kind of activity. In Peter's case, this was running and I had a little laugh about his exercise attire: short running shorts (I'm telling you, they were short, especially for a man) and crew socks. For one of the other people, they had him canoeing as he talked about inequality in North Carolina, where he's from. I don't really see the relation between canoeing and inequality in North Carolina, but whatever. I'm not the one who made the documentary series. 

The documentary series covers subject matters that I'd consider to be under the realm of sociology, at least in some ways, so that was interesting. I wouldn't mind becoming a sociologist in addition to a linguist. Again, it wasn't about things that are totally new subject matters to me, but it was still interesting and compelling and I thought it was well done. It seemed like it was kind of similar to the CNN series United Shades of America, which I've seen a little bit of. I think it would've been interesting if they had gone a little more in depth with this documentary, but it was perfectly decent as it is. 

I wonder if there are any other particularly good documentaries out there about people who are addicted to drugs. (see what I did there?) Among other things, I think I might want to watch the movie All the President's Men, which is about Watergate and Nixon and journalism. I wonder how much I'd enjoy it and what kinds of similarities to the present day it might have. 

Online dating people

I've been meaning to do this post for awhile, and only now am I finally getting around to it. This is going to be kind of similar to that huge long post I did about actors, but this time, I'm going to be rating the various people I see on the online dating website. There will be 4 categories, as follows: ugly, below average, average, above average. I'm just going to tally up how many people fit into each category, in my opinion. I won't pay attention to whether or not they have a high compatibility rating for this. I have the settings set to show people within (I think) 50 miles, but not sorted by compatibility - it's just a random blend. Also, another category: shave! (for people who would look at least somewhat better if they shaved off their facial hair - this one overlaps with the other categories) If a person doesn't have a good enough picture for me to tell which category they belong in, I'll skip them. So here goes!

Ugly: o o o o o o o o o o o o o o 14 

Below average: o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o 27

Average: o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o 148

Somewhat above average: o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o 20

Particularly above average: o o-somewhat 1.5  

Shave!: o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o 26 

It all calculates out at to having looked at 209 profile pictures, about 70% of which were "average." Average to me means neither particularly ugly nor good looking. Just under 10 percent were a bit better looking ("somewhat above average") than the rest, but nothing particularly beautiful. "Somewhat above average" is not good looking enough for me to want to date. 14 I considered to be not just "below average," but "ugly." About 10 percent were "below average", which means they were notably kind of bad looking, but not terribly ugly. 

Picture quality did play some of a role in my ratings - someone who may have been "average" but had a particularly unflattering picture got put into the "below average" category, and so on. Under 1% (one percent!) of the people I saw were "particularly above average." That does not give me a lot of hope regarding this online dating thing... :( 

I wonder what other people would find if they did a similar survey of the people who come up for them. Maybe other people have lower standards than me, and/or perhaps there is a larger number of good looking people in other locations. 

*This was just regarding men. It could be interesting to change my settings so it would only show me women and do the survey again. I wonder how different the results would be.