With Voodoo coming up, I took a quiet-ish weekend.

The highs:

– Listening to Grinderman 2. Thankfully, Nick Cave refuses to grow old gracefully and still wants to make a rock ‘n’ roll racket.

– Overhearing a boy tell his mom in Party City that for Halloween, he wants to be a “bloody Shockey.”

– Watching Robert Rodriguez’ Machete. It’s a good sign that it engaged my wife on the immigration level, a friend at the action level, and me at the genre level. Rodriguez mimics the grindhouse traditions of stunt casting (hiring dubious stars to help sell tickets) and gratuitous sexiness (the machine gun-toting nurses), but none of it feels sleazy in Machete. My only quibble was the suspicion that Don Johnson’s character would have stolen the show had Tarantino made the movie.

The Lows:

– The Saints and LSU lose and look bad doing it.