Old Movies

03.20.2011

I've been on an old movie kick lately, and being me I put an odd spin on it. The "old movies" aren't ancient, black and white films, but just DVDs that have been sitting on the shelf for a while. My odd spin is tri-fold. While ripping DVDs to iTunes, I've been grabbing movies by letter to see what I want to rip ("Ah, here's a stack of 'A's - here we go Armageddon!"). While grabbing stacks I've come across some that I'd actually like to watch again.

The next part of my odd spin is that for some reason I only think I should be watching these on the weekend. I've no idea where that popped up - I'm the king of doing things during the week! School nights be damned! This may be in part to the last part of my odd spin: I've been grouping movies into double features like I used to do when I worked at the video store.

2 weeks ago, I had a double feature of The Core followed by Con Air. A good combo, although Con Air has not aged well with Nicolas Cage in his "I've got an accent" era. This weekend I was following the disaster theme set up by The Core and watched Volcano and Dante's Peak. The bad thing with disaster movies is that after a limited time they become comedies. Volcano is now one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. That may be in part to the Tommy Lee Jones Action Star Era.

Thanks to surfing IMDB I opted to watch something additional/different today. Zack Snyder (of 300 and Watchmen fame) is set to reboot the Superman series. I wondered what else Zack has made, and saw that early on he directed The Dawn of the Dead (zombie survivors hide out in a mall). It's been a while since I zombie-flicked, so I watched it with my Sunday lunch.

I've been wanting to watch the Final Destination movies again. With 4 of them I could make a weekend double-double feature, or I could watch one per night. After Monday - can't pass up wrestling!

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Motorbikecycle Pics

03.06.2011

I've actually had it for 3 weeks, but here are some pics of my 2005 Honta VTX 1800 Retro motorbikecycle:

The original pics from the dealership area lot nicer than anything I've managed in the garage, so I thought I would just go ahead and post those. The only thing I couldn't notice from those pics was that the leather on the bottom of the seat has a little cracking. Not enough to bother me - my year-old SUV has some cracking leather too.

Since getting the bike I've been out on it twice. The first time was during my bike class refresher. I went out again one morning last week for maybe half an hour or so on the back roads near the house. There was at least twice that I was glad nobody was around when I did something stupid.

The 2 things I have to get used to are slow maneuvers - stopping, turning, starting,... a combination of those at the same time - and to not have a death grip on the handlebars. After about 10 minutes my fingers start to go numb from holding on too tight.

For now I still have a healthy respect (or is it fear?) of this beast of a motorcycle. I think that will limit my stupid things to when there's no traffic around for me to run into. That's my plan at least.

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Forty Dos

03.04.2011

Today has been about as low key as I had expected, thanks in part to a return of the dreaded sinus headache which caused me to pop a Sudafed or two while I was taking my blood pressure meds this morning. I ran my two errands of the day - the oil in the Explorer is now new and fresh, and I made my quarterly run to the Madison comic shop and am well stocked on GI Joe comics.

Now I'm readying myself to go to Gina's for dinner followed by the DVD premiere of "Love and Other Drugs", which was advertised as "Anne Hathaway gets naked a lot." I'll admit she doesn't do a whole lot for me (there are plenty of other people I would prefer to see get naked first), but when her nudity is a big advertising point of the movie it piques my curiosity. Especially since the trailers for the movie looked pretty good.

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Forty Dos minus a Day

03.03.2011

Tomorrow I turn 42. I've got nothing planned outside of taking off work. Maybe I can work up the gumption to get the oil changed in the Explorer and put together some shelves/cabinets I got for the garage. Gina's going to cook dinner (pecan crusted Tilapia and asparagus) and we'll probably watch one of the DVDs that I got this week. Overall it's going to be just another day.

I blame part of that on me getting a little sinus infection earlier in the week. I went home after lunch on Monday and drugged myself up (yay Sudafed!) and slept a whole lot. Right now I'm feeling better - it's the first day this week I haven't felt a need to take a nap.

The one birthday tradition I miss is going to see Mom. I'm not sure when I started taking the day to go see here, but I wish I had started doing it sooner, regardless. The first year I went to see her we ended up at the outlet mall in Lebanon (Tennessee) and I got a set of dishes - plates, bowls, some tea glasses. I know I've had that set for 4 or 5 years now at least. Most of the time we would go over to the outlet mall and walk around. For fun we would end up in the KB Toys store and Mom would ask if there was anything I wanted. As much as I believe Christmas and birthdays should have a toy involved, the KB never had anything worthwhile so I always passed.

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The Rock VS Diva Battle Royal

03.02.2011

This has been my week of not feeling good (which may put a damper on anything festive I was planning on doing for my birthday this week). Monday I was especially not feeling good, as I felt as if I had been running a slight fever off and on, and I came home after lunch to self medicate and lay down as much as I wanted. It worked out to be a pretty good plan, not so much in that I was feeling better but that I took lots of little naps, which would have been frowned upon at work.

As the evening progressed I thought that I might not be able to stay awake for the evening's wrestling program. Normally I would just catch up on everything the next day via the interweb, but there was talk that THE ROCK would be on making some type of promo against John Cena. I like THE ROCK promos. I would prefer not to miss THE ROCK promos, especially while he's still making his return and is fresh. So I whipped out the old cell phone and sent a text to WWE Jason: Sick and drugged up, not sure if I'll be able to stay awake, let me know if anything important happens..

I soon got a response: Seg 8 - Rock & Cena taped promo. (For those of you not intimate with the TV industry as I, the show is broken into Segments between commercial breaks. Seg 1 - Commercials - Seg 2 - Commercials - Etc.) It's nice having an inside man. Seg 8 should be around 9:00 or so. Maybe I could stay awake another hour and a half. For fun, I sent Jason a reply: If Seg 8 is a Diva Battle Royal, I will hunt you down and do something really bad. I was too out of it to define what really bad would be, so I would leave it to his imagination. I couldn't think of a worse match than a Diva Battle Royal, so his imagination should come up with something appropriate.

The wrestling of the evening progressed and it was mostly a bunch of promos. Triple H talked. Michale Cole and Lawler talked. Cena talked. Randy Orton talked. The Road to Wrestlemania is paved with talking. I looked at the clock and it was 9:00, and current champ The Miz was talking. He's branded himself as the most Must See champion ever, due in part to his making the rounds of talk shows. He finishes talking and we go to a commercial break. I've been trying to keep up and can't remember for sure if this is should be Segment 7 or 8 coming up, but I'm thinking it's 7 (and hoping it's 8). During the break my phone buzzes. I look at it and have a message from Jason - Coming up is Must See TV!. Hey, maybe it's Segment 8! The commercial break ends and...

Raw comes back with a Diva Battle Royal, with the winner becoming the #1 contender for the Women's Championship. WTF?

I text Jason back that he's got to be kidding me, and he sends back It's Seg 7, I'm safe!. Somehow I managed to unknowingly know that the worse possible match was going to be put on before the big promo. Or, I'm unwittingly writing the script via Jason and need to start sending in my good ideas instead of the bad ones.

The Battle Royal ended (no idea who won, I was too busy deriding Jason the whole 3 minutes it was on), and after another commercial break THE ROCK made his pretaped comments to the people of Buffalo. After he was done, I don't know if I stayed awake through the following commercial break.

I can't believe there was a Diva Battle Royal...

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