Family News – Jeanette will be heading out to PittCon at the beginning of next week, so it’ll just be Evan, Ein and I running the house. I’m not quite sure what visions of terrible destruction and disaster Jeanette is expecting to find on her return, but I’m assuming it’ll be a tad anticlimactic.
Reading – I’m still chipping away at last week’s books, but I though I’d feature an excerpt of my daily reading, the “Worst Case Scenario” desk calendar that Jeanette gave me for Christmas.
I love getting a little snippet of something I’ll probably never need to know (aside from possibly earning me a Caribou Coffee trivia discount) but still fun and interesting. Jeanette has proven to have excellent taste in daily-desk-calendars, with last year’s “Paper Airplane a day”, the prior year’s “Origami a Day”. It’s a welcome daily distraction from the stack of project work always waiting for me at work.
I’m also re-revving back up my interest in memorizing a “poem a month” due to a reminder from my skilled writer of a cousin, Aaron, of how great poetry can be. This month’s selection comes courtesy of him:
W.B. Yeats - A Drinking Song
WINE comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
Movies – We recently Netflixed Vicky Christina Barcelona, Woody Allen’s latest film; It’s odd enough that I can’t necessarily suggest it to anyone, but we enjoyed it quite a bit. Penelope Cruz was great in it and the writing was pretty firm, frankly it was a nice arty palate cleanser for the last few (not goo) movies I’ve seen.
- Wanted – Not good movie based on a quite good graphic novel that would be perfect if I was an angry adolescent.
- The Hulk – A better reboot of the series with Edward Norton playing the titular character. Very workmanlike film without as much angst (read: depth) as the original Ang Lee version. Also, significantly less giant mutant attack poodles.
- In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale - Ok, I had to see it if only to verify that it was truly one of the worst movies of all times. Point made.. Uwe Boll, please stop making movies, seriously, just stop..
Games – I’m plowing through FarCry 2 on the 360, which turned out to be a much better and more engrossing experience than I had expected. The level of visual fidelity of the African landscape really sells the sense of presence, and the controls and basic gunplay game mechanics are pretty solid. It gave me a bit of an “Oblivion” set in modern day war torn Africa vibe, which in my estimation is pretty good. Worthy of a rental if you’re a fan of shooters.
That’s all for now, more to come soon!
