Trader Joe’s grocery store sells wines on the cheap. For the same price as a bottle of “Mad Dog” 20/20, or the dreaded Night Train Express, you can get wine made from real grapes, that won’t even make you go blind.

The most well-known is the Charles Shaw vineyard, called “two-buck-chuck” (or in Minneapolis, “three-buck-chuck,” since a bottle sells for $2.99 here). Chuck is actually made by Mr. Franzia, a California vintner-type person, well-known, at least to my college friends, as the man who brought us fine varietals like “Chillable Red,” sold by the box (the key to box-drinking, my friend Eric taught me, was, when you think it’s tapped, crack open the cardboard, take the silver-looking plastic skein out, and squeeze a whole nother 3/4 of a glass of goodness right into your mouth).

But Franzia’s two-buck-Chuck’s a winner. The 2005 Chardonnay took home the gold medal in the 2007 California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition. And better yet, Trader Joe’s in general has enabled, in every sense, Pulao, me, and many of our friends to afford to drink a lot of wine. Like a lot.

So 12apostrophes has a Wine on the cheap page now, with a snazzy logo, where folks will post reviews of wine, on the cheap, using very few French words, and misunderstanding those that we do.

I’ll start:

“Sick Chicken” Wine
La Ferme Julien
Blanc 2006
$5.99 @ Trader Joe’s

For years, I drank whites like Pinot Grigios and Sauvignon Blancs, tried my best to rehydrate my mouth afterwards, and thought I didn’t really like white wine. But for six bucks, La Ferme Julien’s white blend is light, fruity, not dry (what’s the opposite of dry in oenophile-speak? fruity? wet?), and not-too-sweet. If I was to get poetical about it, I’d say bright. It’s a bright, refreshing wine.

It’s a blend of Bourboulenc, Grenache Blanc, Ugni Blanc, and Roussanne grapes. Separately, I never heard of them. Together, they make a beautiful wine.

We’ve enjoyed Le Ferme Julien equally well at a summer picnic with cous cous and pasta salad; watching a movie at home with a supreme pizza; and at a party where La Ferme Julien was a nice change after some heavy reds.

The first time we drank it, some of our friends saw the rooster on the bottle, consulted their shaky knowledge of French, and decided La Ferme Julien probably meant “the sick chicken.” I can see it; “la ferme,” like infirmary, infirm. And then there was that chicken on the bottle . . . But it really means “Julien’s Farm.”

If I ever see a bottle called Le Poulet Malade, I’m buying the hell out of it.

Culled from blogs much cooler than this one, I recently stumbled upon a few (free!) Flash games to while away the hours between getting to work and lunch, and between lunch and quitting time.

Boomshine (http://www.k2xl.com/games/boomshine):

In this game, little colorful dots float aimlessly across the screen at different speeds and rebound off the walls. A mouse-click creates a small, expanding “explosion” that causes any dots it touches to also explode. The goal is to explode increasing numbers of dots, and the only way to do it at higher levels is to start chain reactions across the screen. There may be lots and lots of skill required for this game, but I’ve found that random clicks and watching the pretty colors keeps me entertained and works just as well. Also, turn the music off to hear the cool, chimey sound effects (which make for the cutest explosions ever, Pulao said once while playing).

Sphere (http://www.jigsaw.x0.com/sphere_e/index.html):

A locked-room mystery without the murder. You’re locked in the room, and your goal is to escape. Everything you need is somewhere in there with you. Click your mouse to see a different part of the room, zoom in, affect something in your environment, or pick up and carry an item (or combine your items together). Winning relies a little too heavily on the “Oh!-I-can-click-there?/Didn’t-see-that” factor, but the puzzles are fun and satisfying. When Pulao and I solved it, I was a little sad to leave the room behind. [p.s. when you need to do something else or close the browser, your progress (and items) can be magically saved.]

The Restaurant Game (http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/restaurant):

This isn’t a Flash game, per se, but something cool nonetheless. The goal of the Restaurant Game project, conducted by the MIT Media Lab, is to develop game-engine artificial intelligence that better mimics the behavior of real people. When you play (either as a waitress or a customer) the game learns from what you do, and down the line it will be released as a 1-player game, with game designer credits for all the players. As for the gameplay now, you interact with another person to either buy or serve food, and afterwards rate the other’s intelligence, kindness, etc., and guess their age (and what they eat for breakfast), which is always fun. You know, judging people. [p.s. best time to logon (to guarantee there'll be somebody to play with) is between 7 - 9 p.m. U.S. Eastern time.]

Ridley Scott must have seen Pearl Harbor and said, “That’s what I want to do!”  And William Monahan, who had split a jumbo carton of Raisinets with Scott, said, “I’ll get you a script by Monday.”  What other explanation is there?  Since Pearl Harbor, no one can claim ignorance of the historical epic’s cinematic follies; Scott & Co. must have meant to employ them.  Judged by those standards, Kingdom of Heaven acquits itself admirably.  It nails the trifecta of overblown-period-piece suck.

1. Writing.  William Monahan won an Oscar for writing the departed.  He sure didn’t earn it here; Kingdom of Heaven has one of those rare scripts that dares to show and tell.  Like when Balian (Orlando Bloom), accused of killing a priest, helpfully informs his just-found father (Liam Neeson) that the charges are true.  We know, Balian.  We saw you set him on fire.  And how about the clichés?  Surrendering Jerusalem to Saladin—after lots of period battle scenes, after lots of speeches that are stirring only in that they sound like other speeches that actually are stirring—Balian asks his erstwhile opponent what the city is worth.  “Nothing,” says Saladin.  He paces away, then turns back.  Guess his next line.  There’s also the fact that the screenplay grants its characters as much depth and humanity as a crime blotter, and probably ended every line of dialogue with “[Significant pause].”  Hell, that’s probably why this thing runs 150 bloated minutes.

2. Directing.  Kingdom of Heaven had a budget of $130 million.  Ridley Scott puts every dollar on screen in the least efficient way.  Okay, he couldn’t really film character development, since the script gave him nothing to work with, but instead of trying to tell a story Scott loads up every frame with stuff.  During the siege, Saladin’s forces storm the walls of Jerusalem with wheeled assault towers.  Balian’s defenders attach ropes to spears, skewer the towers, and topple them.  We get it the first time, but apparently Scott had some CGI budget to spend, because he shows another tower falling, then another, then another, and then pans across the wall to show them toppling in sequence.  The movie is so rich in visual detail that it ends up being as redundant as the script.

3. Acting.  Why is Orlando Bloom here?  His biggest hits were CGI-heavy series where thespianism got bumped from the marketing strategy in favor of Burger King cups.  Don’t make him do the heavy lifting in a “philosophical” historical epic, because the result is 150 minutes of his must-not-fart face.  The script gives Balian one note—grim but noble determination—so it’s hard to blame Orlando for milking it dry, but no one else gets more than one note and they somehow work around it.  David Thewlis owns the movie in the filler role of the priest, Liam Neeson manages to enliven Balian’s Crusader father, Kevin McKidd does the work as a doomed exposition mouthpiece—fuck, Martin Csokas shifts himself to enliven a villain whose main task is to wind up naked and dunce-capped on the back of an ass.  It’s Balian’s story, so it’s Bloom’s movie, and in it Bloom reveals that his only talent is making teen girls squeal.  If he starred in a romantic comedy with his fellow grooming-salon graduate Jennifer Aniston, the charisma vacuum they’d generate would turn the universe inside out.

Somewhere in Kingdom of Heaven, there’s a point about Christianity and Islam, West and (Middle) East, coexisting in piece—about the value of religious belief when weighed against human life.  Someone else can talk about that.  I’m more interested in the movie’s point about Hollywood.  The witless script, the clueless direction, the somnambulant acting—these were all mistakes that Pearl Harbor made.  That movie still stands as a cinematic nadir.  Not for nothing did the puppet in Team America sing, “I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made Pearl Harbor—and that’s an awful lot, girl.”  But since PH made $450 million worldwide on a $140-million budget, the crappiness of the thing was forgotten and the parasitic lifeform flourished.  Here it is again, and the only good thing I can say about it is that this incarnation is (slightly) better than King Arthur.

I guess at this point I have to start justifying my Netflix queue, so here goes. I liked Ben Kingsley in Dave and thought he was impressive in Sexy Beast (although I couldn’t get through the movie as a whole), plus HBO Films has a reputation for quality. That’s how I came to see Mrs. Harris. Based on a true story, it stars Annette Bening as the title character, a headmistress who attaches herself to Kingsley’s self-professed “country doctor” Herman Tarnower. Tarnower is less rural sawbones and more egocentric, womanizing publicity hound, and Harris soon finds herself taking a backseat to Tarnower’s pursuit of younger women and his rise to fame with the Scarsdale Diet. As he neglects her (except to write her dubious prescriptions), Harris goes into an emotional tailspin that ultimately drives her, one rainy night, to go to his house with a gun. Before night’s end, Tarnower is dead and Harris is facing murder charges.

I hate Annette Bening. Part of me thinks she keeps choosing to play brittle, needy types who snap in hopes of capturing the Oscar that Hilary Swank denied her the first time; another part of me remembers her staticky, Lifetime-movie “complexity” way back in The American President; neither part of me likes to see her on screen. Mrs. Harris has to accomplish a lot of heavy lifting to get me past that. That it does is due to some strong direction and an interesting script, both by Phyllis Nagy. Was it murder? The movie presents two scenarios: in the opening, the gun goes off as Tarnower tries to wrest it from Harris (the real-life Harris’s story); at the end, Harris arrives at Tarnower’s in a near-fugue state and shoots him in the back out of anger. (In both scenes, after the shooting Bening puts an acquiescent Tarnower to bed. I’d want a ride to the hospital, but the good doctor and I differ on many points.) Thus the movie manages to avoid passing judgment (in real life, she was convicted) without glossing over the details of the case.

The fact is, the Jean Harris of the movie—borderline under a façade of patrician competence—is exactly the kind of role that suits Bening, and the fact that I don’t like that role doesn’t mean she inhabits it poorly. She captures the way emptiness can erode the foundations of a personality until the whole edifice collapses. The sequence where Harris, having been dumped, sends Tarnower a letter by registered mail and then calls him, near tears, to request that he destroy it is exemplary. She knows he’ll have to sign for the letter and, thus, still have some marginal contact with her; by the time she realizes how pathetic and desperate this plan is, it’s too late for her to extricate herself without another flaky gesture. She sees what she is but can’t change it. As Tarnower, Kingsley is both sane and plausibly blind to Harris’s precarious emotional state, and manages to infuriate me even though Harris generally deserves his callous treatment. The movie is packed with familiar faces (Michael Gross has a basically silent role as a society husband; there are also Mary McDonnell, Brett Butler, Lee Garlington, Cloris Leachman, Frances Fisher, Chloe Sevigny, and Philip Baker Hall), but Nagy has the sense to clear the dance floor and let Kingsley and Bening destroy each other unimpeded.

It’s a true story, but I find Mrs. Harris odd in that Tarnower never seems to like Harris all that much. Maybe it’s just that Kingsley applies his smarmy charm equally to Bening and to any other woman Tarnower wants to get naked with. When Tarnower proposes to Harris, it’s like he couldn’t find anything else to do that week; when he backpedals, swearing he loves her but doesn’t want to be married, why doesn’t he back out all the way? My best interpretation is that he liked having a long string of ladies on his line too much to let her go completely. If that’s the case, then frankly, they both got what they deserved.

I’ve been hearing for a while that the latest in party-game crazes is Apples to Apples, and I’m happy to report that after a single night’s shennanigans, I can declare myself a big fan.

See, my two favorite games so far have been Taboo and Drinking Jenga and Apples to Apples provides a combination of both those games. (I feel legally obligated to tell you that drinking apparently isn’t really a requirement– but, like I’ve been telling my writing students for years, there are just some things you shouldn’t try without being drunk.)

The premise of the game is fairly simple. There are two kinds of cards: green and red. Green cards have adjectives on them, and the red ones nouns. One person turns a green card over, and then the rest of the players pick a red card each from their hand that they feel best matches the adjective. If the judge, the person who flipped over the green card, agrees with your noun-adjective matching, then you win– which means that you get to keep the green card. Whoever gets to ten green cards first wins.

Wait, did I say simple? I meant painful to explain, but the game ends up being fun anyway.

The main thing is that Apples to Apples is a sly game– winning at it is sometimes about having an imaginative vocabulary, or being quick with pop-cultural references, and other times it really is about you making connections that are weird enough to get noticed, but popular enough to get you get picked a lot. (For example, I picked Thunder as the best noun for the adjective Cranky– but I couldn’t tell you why.) Then again, sometimes it’s about an affection for puns, and sometimes it’s about simple associations between concepts. Who knows? Not me, since I didn’t actually win.

What I do know is that a sure-fire way to make it fun is to play this game with five other loud, oustpoken people. Or, to be honest, with four loud, outspoken people and a petite, quiet woman. (Well, to be perfectly fair, with one petite and quiet woman, one outspoken stoned guy, two moderately enthusiastic people, one fairly enthusaistic player, and a partridge in a pear tree. Plus wine.)

Regardless, it’s an incredibly fun game, and I know that some reader/contributor of 12apostrophes recently got it as a birthday present so I’m waiting to get invited over, especially now that I hear you can buy a bible expansion pack.

$24.99 at Target.com

Because coming of age is boring unless something else is going on.

Because the best time to make a list of your favorite albums of the year is less than three hours after you’ve had two teeth yanked from your lower jaw, with the dentist breaking one in the process and having to poke around in the hole to tweeze out all the root fragments—right?

10.  Mission of Burma, The Obliterati, 2006
It has its flaws, like the too-sludgy sound throughout and the fact that they let their drummer, Peter Prescott, write a few of the songs when they shouldn’t.  But I’ve been missing guitar breaks for a while, and there’s an amazing one in Roger Miller’s “Careening with Conviction.”  Plus they’re haunted by the freakish size of Nancy Reagan’s head.  I can get behind that.

9.  Sons and Daughters, Love the Cup EP, 2004
I already had The Repulsion Box, so I knew what to expect:  punk set to a Scottish-folk beat.  (Or Scottish folk with punk vocals.)  Nonetheless, “Broken Bones” has some of the most restrained guitar I’ve heard this year, and “Johnny Cash” rumbles along quite nicely.

8.  Michael Gordon (composer), Decasia, 2002
Decasia the movie is a compilation of decaying filmstrips that flicker in and out of resolution for an hour.  Decasia the symphony is the best haunted-house music I’ve heard since Mocket’s Pro Forma.  The even-numbered movements are the spookiest—think Sonic Youth with a full orchestra.

7.  Gorillaz, Demon Days, 2005
A party album about the apocalypse.  “November Has Come” is my favorite song.

6.  Wilderness, Vessel States, 2006
I think every review of this album that I read compared Wilderness to Public Image, Ltd.  Fortunately, I’ve never heard Public Image, Ltd.  Whichever guy is the vocalist, he doesn’t sing so much as declaim, and the guitars sound pretty piddly to my PJ-Harvey-trained ears, but not in a bad way.

5.  The Timeout Drawer, Nowonmai, 2005
In the same post-rock (so:  instrumental-rock) vein as Sigur Ros and Mono, but without the adscititious sense of grandeur.  They wield keyboards, flutes, and cellos when necessary, but the whole album still sounds like it was recorded in a garage.  That’s the charm.

4.  Maximo Park, A Certain Trigger, 2005
I probably listened to this more than any other album I bought this year.  I finally figured out where they got their guitar sound:  Tommy Tutone.  “The Coast Is Always Changing” has the best chorus I’ve heard in a while.  Pure radio pop, or at least it would be if Clear Channel had any sense.

3.  Carla Bozulich, Evangelista, 2006
Carla Bozulich could fart on tape and I’d buy it and praise it.  The Geraldine Fibbers were just that good.  Evangelista is a little disappointing, though, mainly because I was hoping for an album that would sound like “Blue Boys” from the Kill Rock Stars compilation Fields and Streams:  all children’s instruments and toys, shaped into song.  Instead, she borrows Godspeed You! Black Emperor to make an album that sounds a lot like ‘30s blues, only with more screaming.  The cover of Low’s “Pissing” is too faithful, but “Evangelista I”…dude.

2.  Thomas Stronen, Pohlitz, 2006
Basically, he pulled out all his pots and pans, plinked away on them for half an hour, and added some keyboard squiggles to flesh out the sound.  But it works.  With its weird triangle pings, “Dispatches” is my favorite track.

1.  P.O.S., Audition, 2006
Local.  Genius.  At first I thought P.O.S. wasn’t as good as Atmosphere.  Then I noticed that I listed to this album every day, whereas I listened to Atmosphere about twice a month.  It’s like the crapitization of mainstream hip-hop never happened—there’s cello on “De La Souls,” punk screaming on “Half-Cocked Concepts,” self-deprecation on “Living Slightly Larger,” and P.O.S. acts like it all belongs there.  Best line is the first one.

This is the kind of album that isn’t bad on its own terms. Mono plays moody, atmospheric instrumental rock that would have made a good soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings if Peter Jackson were as innovative as everyone says he is and didn’t bow to convention with a full-blown orchestra and choir. Several of the six songs stretch into the ten-minute range, the better to incorporate thrilling sequences of crescendos, climaxes, and decrescendos. The shorter, quieter songs are welcome interludes between the epic-battle, tragic-death compositions that dominate the album. And the art is great—the blue booklet imitates the texture of a cloth-bound memoir, the watercolor portraits inside remind me of Genesis’s We Can’t Dance, and the whole CD comes in a cardboard sleeve like Interpol’s Antics, with a different painting on each side so that you can choose your cover.

No, the issue with Mono is that I already have a Sigur Ros album in my collection, and it’s actually by Sigur Ros.

In other news, I see that Penis Enlargement felt it necessary to weigh in on Pulao’s prelims-vs.-virginity post.  I offer our guest this humble suggestion:  get some better search algorithms.

Here’s the pitch:  “A bad action movie—with puppets!”  Here’s the result:  a bad action movie with puppets.  Team America, ostensibly a superhero supergroup, destroys a plethora of UNESCO World Heritage sites in order to save them.  This irritates the Film Actors Guild (F.A.G.), the members of which, led by Alec Baldwin, organize world leaders against Team America and for peace.  But this plays right into the hands of Kim Jong Il, who plots to destroy the world while its dignitaries are enjoying a stage show starring the likes of Janeane Garofalo and Sean Penn.  (Which raises the question, “When’s the last time anyone enjoyed Janeane Garofalo or Sean Penn?”)  The only one who can save the world is Gary, a Broadway actor whose juvenile thespianism indirectly got his brother eaten by gorillas.  Can Gary conquer his fears and stop the madman?

Trey Parker and Matt Stone deliver a note-perfect rendition of American action clichés, from the flags spattered all over Team America’s G.I.-Joe-style vehicles to the members’ homophobic homoeroticism.  The problem is, they get so invested in imitation that they forget the mockery.  They seem to think the clichés will be funny because they’re acted out by puppets, which is like saying Friends was funny because they had a chimp.  Passing for humor are gross-out set pieces that punctuate long stretches of conventional action.  When Lisa poops on Gary during their mid-movie humpathon, the camera zeroes in on stringy brown turds that squirt from a plastic butt and fall onto Gary’s grinning, open-eyed face.  This basically rips off the joke from South Park:  Bigger, Longer, Uncut, but this time around the set-up is too blunt to be funny.

Matt and Trey have been treading comedic water for a while now.  Ever since That’s My Bush!, they’ve shown more interest in aping Hollywood crap than they have in parodying it.  They’ve also gotten into the lazy habit of assuming that F-bombs are funny just because fourth graders drop them.  When I was in fourth grade, my classmates and I said “fuck” on a daily basis.  We weren’t trying to be funny; that was just how we talked.  The creators of South Park have forgotten that.  From producing some of the most hilarious stuff I’ve ever seen, they’ve come all the way to being lazy schlockmeisters whose obligatory nods toward their incendiary roots are both obnoxious and out-of-place.  Make a Barbra Streisand movie, guys.  At least that’ll be honest.

Our cat, Hank, decided at 5:15 this morning that my wife and I should definitely get out of bed.

He communicated this by repeatedly jumping on the bed, meowing, and scratching my wife’s face. Normally, I would think this was no big deal, except she insisted on giving a running commentary of it to me which interfered with my sleep.

After a few minutes of this, Pulao got up and closed the door to the bedroom, which was a good idea, but Hank doesn’t quite grasp the closed-door concept. He scratched the door, rattled it, and meowed; all much more loudly than you would expect a medium-sized animal to be able to do.

Luckily, he has a short attention span, so after ten minutes of scratching, rattling, and meowing, he grew tired of it and wandered off through the apartment.

But unluckily, Hank has a very short attention span, so after about 5 minutes of wandering through the apartment he thought: “What was I doing? Oh yeah.” Scratch. Rattle. Meow. Repeat indefinitely.

This made me think about when I have children, and how Hank disturbing my sleep might be like having a baby.

But really, more like a special baby, who will never learn to talk, or feed himself, or draw birthday cards for me very well.

So, Cats v. Babies. Thoughts?