I remember being pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed Serenity last fall when I saw it in the theater. When I discovered it was out on DVD I grabbed a copy. It has the perfect mix of black humor, likable characters, and engaging plot.
Rating: Destined to be a long-time favorite.
“Go this way!” “No, it’s on fire” “Over here!” “We have to go up” “Hold your breath!”
Rating: Just once I’d like to see a disaster movie that kills everyone.
Oh. Wait. That was On The Beach.
The theater nearest to where I live has very early matinees on the weekends. The first showing is usually around 11:00 am. As a bonus the admission price to this early show is only $4.50, two dollars less than the usual admittance price. However, that isn’t the best part.
The best part comes from living in a very religious community. Church attendance is high in these parts which means the pool of people going to see movies first thing Sunday morning is small. The last several movies I’ve seen at the 11:00 am showing have been deserted, even the new releases are under populated. At MI:III and The Sentinel I only had to share the theater with a total of seven other people. That’s for both movies combined.
I’m off to see Poseidon by myself this morning.
My father loves mysteries and introduced me to Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallender series. Faceless Killers is only the first. Set in Sweden, the characters are richly developed, and bleak, wet cold of a northern latitude winter makes you ache as you imagine being there.
Rating: I’ve already gone out and purchased the second book in the series.
Somehow I managed to miss seeing Along Came A Spider until now. I remember reading the book and enjoying it, and I found the movie well done too. It had been long enough since I’d read it that the plot twists caught me off guard. All in all a good movie.
Rating: Put it on your Netflix queue.
Rating: Worth seeing in the theater. Maybe even purchasing the DVD.
After nearly six years of having a blog, and close to 900 entries, the one thing I don’t have is many comments. There have been twenty-nine comments total, to be exact, barely three percent in ratio to the postings. I don’t really write here for the comments, and I suppose that most of my postings are a bit personal for people to participate in by adding their two cents worth.
Henceforth I will not be enabling the comment feature on new postings. Eventually I’ll get around to turning comments off on all the existing postings, just to avoid getting any comment spam while I’m not looking.
If you want to respond to something I’ve written here, please feel free to email me. There’s a contact link towards the bottom of the colophon.
Ever since they started becoming widespread I have been a fan of pay-at-the-pump gas stations. That I don’t have to go stand in line behind someone buying a lifetime supply of losing lottery tickets, or brave the stale, smoke-tinged air of some service stations is fine with me.
Part of the pay-at-the-pump experience is waiting for your card to be approved before you pump your gas. I’ve often wondered about the algorithm behind that approval process. Is it programmed for a set amount, say $50, or does it input the current price of gas and multiply by an average amount of gas purchased, perhaps 20 gallons. Lately this curiosity has increased as the price of gas has increased. If the pumps are set to pre-approve a set dollar amount it is likely that rising prices have forced all the pumps to be reprogrammed to have a higher set point. Filling my 22 gallon tank with 91 octane regularly exceeds $50 now, and on occasion tops $60.
It would be easy to pre-approve $100 on the thinking that few vehicles would hold more than 30 or so gallons of $3.00 gas. But what about the poor guy who just wants to top off his tank before leaving town and who only need 5 or 10 gallons (a $30 purchase say) whose card has a currently limit less than the $100 set point? This person would be denied the sale not because they didn’t have the funds, but because they didn’t have the minimum funds to get approved.
I realize that the gas stations are more concerned about getting guarantees that the credit and debit card sales made at the pump are in fact viable in terms of ability to pay. And I suspect they are willing for a certain percentage of customers to be denied in the interests of not losing money on non pre-approved sales. As a developer of software I am always curious about the larger social implications of seemingly minor programming decisions.
Throughout my life I’ve never been able to remember my dreams. On rare occasion I’ll wake up and know that I’ve been dreaming, but the images in my head are fleeting and disappear almost immediately. It has never really bothered me, until now.
Before the reason for my upset will make sense I need to explain about the week Michele’s father was killed. On a Thursday evening, late in October we were sitting in our living room with the television on; Michele was in the easy chair and I was at my desk working on the computer. I was suddenly aware that someone had walked between me and the TV, however when I looked up no one was there. Knowing that Michele sometimes saw people I asked her if anyone was in the room with us. She looked past me and said, “Yes. There’s a man in uniform standing behind you.” At the time neither of us knew that her father had been in an accident that day, and was currently in a coma on life support in Knoxville. It would be two more days before we learned he was even in the hospital. Later we understood that the image I had seen move across the room, and the man in uniform she saw, was her father come to say goodbye.
Until that event I wasn’t 100% sure that spirits, or whatever, moved among us. I’m an empirical kind of guy and there just wasn’t any real evidence. Seeing it for myself finally convinced me. Since Michele’s death I have often wondered if her spirit has visited me. On several occasions her side of the bed has been turned down when I’ve come home. I know that Taz (one of the cats) is doing this when she burrows under the covers to sleep. But it is only ever on Michele’s side of the bed, and it is usually done very neatly - especially for a cat. I am certain that Michele is standing there egging Taz on so as to let me know she is okay.
All of this leads up to my dream this morning. I dreamed that I was talking to Michele, and her to me. When I awoke whatever we talked about was gone in an instant. In fact at the time I didn’t realize I’d had a dream about her. It was only later when I discovered that I felt like I did after talking to Michele. Maybe all of this is conjecture and projection on the part of my grief. Maybe it truly is real. Either way, I felt a tiny bit better today for having talked to Michele in my dreams last night.
Sweet dreams indeed.
Rating: I miss Peter Graves, Leonard Nimoy, Barbara Bain, and Martin Landau.