Category: movies

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I spoke too soon, we did eat dinner at Ryan’s. We changed our mind at
the last minute, and gorged on turkey, potatoes, sweet potatoes, okra,
mac and cheese, ham, and all the other good stuff. It being free day
today, I have to eat while the iron is hot. Tomorrow that goes away.

For fun tonight, we watched Monsters, Inc., which I
loved! What a good movie. This would be a good DVD to own, since there
is a whole second disc of extra stuff. I watched the fake bloopers and
some of the production stuff. I could see exploring the rest over time.

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I voted this morning. Unlike the primaries, where I cast the second
ballot of the day at 8:30 AM, today I cast the 80th at around the same
time. This was the first time I had used the touch screens (like
almost everyone in Georgia) and I found them easy to use. A lot of
people seemed to be taking a long time, but I don’t think that’s a
function of the touch screens because they all seemed to be spending a
lot of time on the referenda. That’s where what I did, which was
reading them all last night on the secretary of state’s website and
figuring out how I was voting, comes in handy. It sucks to have a full
page referendum that you are seeing for the first time as you are at
the poll. Preparation helps.

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I saw the film Punch-drunk
Love yesterday, and without a doubt it is far and away the best
Adam Sandler movie I’ve seen. It was weird in that typical Paul Thomas
Anderson way but completely and totally satisfying. I really felt for
the lead character. Reading Roger
Ebert’s review gave me some additional insight into how one can
read this movie as criticism of or reaction to Sandler’s other
movies. It’s slow paced and quiet, which makes the eruptions of noise
and violence seem that much harsher. A few people in our theater got
up and walked out around 30 minutes in, which is just where I thought
it started hitting its stride. I recommend this film highly,
especially for people who don’t particularly like Adam Sandler movies.

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Music TopicCurrently I’m listening to one of the better shows at WREK, the
psychedelic show Psych Out. It’s really good, and you can listen to it
any time via the MP3 archives. If you like psychedelic music at all,
60’s style or modern, American, British or Japanese, give it a
listen. You can hear it in High
bandwidth or dialup
style versions from the MP3 archives, any time you like. Ain’t
technology grand?

Fat, Greek

I’m finally starting to feel a little better. If this was a workday I
would be up to going to work. My mother-in-law is in town this
weekend, and yesterday we went to see My Big Fat Greek
Wedding, which I liked quite a bit. I especially like how it
was atypically Hollywood, in that the transition from frumpy girl to
pretty girl was not that dramatic and while pretty enough, the “after”
transformation woman was not a stunner. I get very tired of Hollywood
judgements of beauty, such as The Truth about Cats and
Dogs, where Uma Thurman is the pretty girl and Janeane
Garafalo is the ugly girl. In almost any other context in the world,
JG would be considered attractive in her own right. I have like John
Corbett for a long time, and thought he did a great job. I expected to
enjoy the movie, but it was quite a bit better than I thought it would
be.

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More SUV stuff, this time from The Car Talk guys, including
the “Need a SUV quiz?” I’d like to see a study on how many accidents
are caused indirectly by SUVs, by the fact that drivers in normal
sized passenger vehicles can’t see around them. My personal SUV goal –
I’d like to see them require a special class of license with a
mandatory SUV driving test. I’m tired of dodging Lincoln Navigators
that cross the center line when their drivers can’t handle
them. Forget terrorism, I have much more immediate risk to my life and
safety posed to me by drivers of Ford Excursions talking on their cellphones.

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I didn’t even write anything in here yesterday because I was too sick
to even focus long enough for it. I had foolishly gone into work and
then faded fast and by lunchtime I was ready to just put my head down
and go to sleep. I came home and watched a couple of those MST3K
episodes on my laptop, with it lying on my belly on the couch. I gave
up the VCD path, just watching the AVI files directly and then
deleting them. It turns out that one I downloaded, The
Incredibly Strange Creatures blah blah Mixed up Zombies isn’t
what I thought it was. I had already seen that one. For some reason, I
was thinking that was the movie where Rosie Greer got a white man’s
head implanted on his shoulder. On the agenda for today – sleeping,
OJ, and cartoons.

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I just heard the funniest thing I’ve ever heard on local news. They
were talking about these floating churches on rivers in Russia. The
newscast included the line “Obviously, these churches are perfect for
baptisms.” In most nautical situations, that would be called
“keelhauling” but here it is a baptism.

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I may not be weblogging or posting to the newsgroups much over the
next week. I’m at one of those climax points (as in climax forests) where to do anything
means not doing another thing. I have enough to do that I could not
sleep in the next two weeks and still be busy. Just a few quick
thoughts for the moment.

I got the Aimee Mann CD I preordered today. It is a beautiful package,
a great CD. If it weren’t for free downloads, I wouldn’t have known it
was available. There’s a datum of no statistical significance for you.

I spoke too soon on that Arin stuff yesterday. Today, they switched over
the other server, so I was back to implementing the new parsing All At
Once in a Big Hurry. I got it done, though. I really have to rewrite
this crappy whois proxy thing that the script is based around –
something my boss downloaded from somewhere.

Dragon*Con starts on Friday. I’ll probably swing by downtown Thursday
night and pick up the registration stuff while it is relatively
easy. That way I can leave work early on Friday and just waltz in. If
I’m not on any panels, I’ll pick the events I want to attend, budget
myself a few hours for the dealers room, an evening to wander around
parties, and not attend the rest of the time. I originally was telling
my wife that I couldn’t do anything that weekend but now I’m changing
my mind. We might go to Rome to visit some kinda-kin of hers. Or maybe
not.

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Movie TopicLast night we watched a great movie, Wet Hot American
Summer. It’s broadly a parody of summer camp movies and teen
coming of age movies, but also includes much of the weird dark humor
that infested my favorite skit comedy show, MTV’s The
State. Most of the cast members are there as are several of
the creative forces. And I’m serious that I think The
State is a better show than Kids in the
Hall, better than Monty Python. It is a
show that I’d buy every episode on DVD in a heartbeat. To this day, I
cannot hear the phrase “Porcupine racetrack” without grinning.