Post­ing Avoid­ance Syndrome strikes again. PAS — another acronym to add to the side­bar maybe? Too bad I couldn’t fig­ure out an ‘s’ word to put on the end to make it PASS.

I spent the evening adding cap­tions to the lat­est Post Office pho­tos and locat­ing them on my Flicker map. I now need to find a photo rep­re­sent­ing heat for the Tues­day Chal­lenge. I’m seri­ously con­sid­er­ing using a photo I used for a meme in the long ago past, but will prob­a­bly use the HHI sun­rise photo from a cou­ple weeks ago, at least it is a lit­tle more current.

I can’t even come up with descrip­tive titles.

Watched Deja Vu on Sun­day. I was right with them, even the whole time travel thing, up until Den­zel gets shipped back 4–1/2 days. Fif­teen, twenty min­utes ear­lier they made a big deal of send­ing a piece of paper back. They said they had to keep the mass low and still the power require­ments were so high that they blacked out the whole city of New Orleans doing it just as the paper was mate­ri­al­iz­ing. Every­one held their breath to see if the 3 x 5 scrap of paper suc­cess­fully made the trip. How they man­age to send back a 200lb man after strug­gling with the paper I just couldn’t believe.

I am usu­ally happy to sus­pend my belief in real­ity for a good movie, but it seems lately that there is always a point in the movie that brings me crash­ing back. I’m bet­ting there is a term for it in Roger Ebert’s Lit­tle Movie Glos­sary, but the best I can come up now is “jump­ing the shark.”

When we watched National Trea­sure I was hap­pily enjoy­ing the trip when they bust into the vault under Inde­pen­dence Hall or wher­ever it was that has been sealed for 200 years and they flick a cig­a­rette lighter to the torches lin­ing the walls and they light right up and burn brightly for the rest of adven­ture. Come on. Our found­ing fathers must have pur­chased them from the same place as the Pharaohs of Egypt because every time an explorer find a mummy’s tomb, the torches in there light right up after millenniums.

It hap­pened in The Astro­naut Farmer too. I don’t remem­ber exactly what did it, but it was some­time late in the movie. I mean I even bought the fact that launch­ing a rocket through the roof of a barn wouldn’t incin­er­ate the barn. But I was jarred into real­ity some­where and ended up shak­ing my head in disbelief.

I don’t think it will hap­pen in the 3rd Jason Bourne movie, but it is pos­si­ble. I hope it doesn’t hap­pen in the 3rd Pirates of the Caribbean movie, but it is probable.

Seems like every third com­mer­cial is for a fra­grance. Both men’s and women’s. The actresses all look famil­iar, like famous peo­ple, they prob­a­bly are, but I can’t be sure, my sub­scrip­tion to Peo­ple expired in 1981.

I saw a com­mer­cial for a vin­tage Tide T-shirt. If you bought one the pro­ceeds would go to help Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina and vic­tims of the Cal­i­for­nia wild­fires. Cool, I’ll help. The shirts are $15, but I never found out how much they wanted for ship­ping. I would have given them my credit card data to buy the shirt, but first I would have to reg­is­ter to use their site and to do that you need to give them the usual pha­lanx of info. For­get it, not like I’d ever use their site again.

The Bourne Ulti­ma­tum was very good, left me want­ing more. It really never slows down for you to dwell long enough on the improb­a­bil­i­ties and impos­si­bil­i­ties to let them spoil the movie. I won­der if the series is avail­able in a three disc set or are they wait­ing for the 4th movie? I don’t know if they are going to make another movie, but they sure left it open for one. Mat­ter of fact they prob­a­bly already have a script, just retool the sec­ond movie a little…

To wash the bad taste of At World’s End out of our mouths from the other night, we popped in TDPM this afternoon.

Gov­er­nor Swann: Per­haps on the rare occa­sion pur­su­ing the right course demands an act of piracy, piracy itself can be the right course?

Aaaah, that’s better.

This Sun­day after­noon Donna, her cousin Lau­rie, and I are going to see the Trans Siber­ian Orches­tra in Colum­bia. To get ready we have been lis­ten­ing to their Christ­mas Eve & Other Sto­ries CD in the car.

Tonight we trav­eled to Augusta to go to Best Buy where we were to pick up a gift card for her boss (and the Jason Bourne Col­lec­tion for me.) I was at a loss as to what to get for my boss. He has two small boys, so I thought while at Best Buy I would pick up a DVD with some My 3 Sons episodes and just mark through the 3 and replace it with a two. Then I’d tell him I edited out all the scenes with Chip in them. Turns out My Three Sons isn’t on DVD. Dang. My wife, the sen­si­ble one (as if that isn’t self evi­dent already) sug­gested we get him a Tran Siber­ian Orches­tra CD.

We found the Trans Siber­ian CDs easy and right next to Christ­mas Eve & Other Sto­ries was The Christ­mas Attic. When Donna asked did we have that, I said no. She said, “Buy it.” So we did. Less than 3 months after sell­ing my entire 486 CD col­lec­tion, we now have a col­lec­tion of one.

Find­ing the Jason Bourne Col­lec­tion was a lot harder. I looked up front in the new release area, but the only DVDs there were sin­gle disc Bourne Ulti­ma­tums. I checked the Drama aisle and then the Action/Adventure sec­tions to no avail. I then gave up and fig­ured when I did my in store pickup of For­bid­den Planet I’d ask the clerk where to find it. The line for in store pickup was 4 deep, so we divided to con­quer. I stood in line and Donna enlisted the help of Pamela Landy to find Jason. Actu­ally she found a tall guy in a blue shirt and asked. His first response was, “We have that?” but led Donna to the close prox­im­ity of where it should be before he him­self had to ask another asso­ciate. Turns out the non­de­script sil­ver pack­age was up front on a big dis­play stand. It was on the bot­tom row of about 15 rows of giant yel­low headed Homers on the cover of the Simp­sons Movie.

DOH! My boss is a Simp­sons fan. I should have bought him the movie. I’m always one step behind.…

Proud Mary? But then again if I knew to read that wikipedia entry before going. This afternoon’s Trans-Siberian Orches­tra started a lit­tle late for one of two rea­sons, the band arrived late or the bas­ket­ball floor wasn’t taken up in a timely man­ner, both of which we heard while wait­ing to get into the arena, but there wasn’t any offi­cial word.

Photo by Jer­seyJJ

They made up for it by play­ing for about 2–1/2 hours. The first half was an enhanced ver­sion of Christ­mas Eve & Other Sto­ries. Then they intro­duced the band and used Proud Mary to segue into non Christ­mas TSO music for the sec­ond half.

A few things have changed in the 3 decades since I went to a live music con­cert. First, the only smoke in the sta­dium was gen­er­ated by the band’s spe­cial effects crew and didn’t have that famil­iar sweet smell. Sec­ondly, to show appre­ci­a­tion peo­ple used to hold up their lit butane lighters, now you have the glow of thou­sands of cell phone cam­eras. The trou­ble is, the glow only shows to the crowd, but the band is obliv­i­ously aware they were miss­ing out, because towards the end they asked every­one in the crowd to hold up their cell phones towards them for a whole song.

Good show. Loud, kind of made lis­ten­ing to one of their CDs seem too quiet no mat­ter how far to the right you twisted the vol­ume knob.

Please accept — with no oblig­a­tion, implied or implicit — my best wishes for an envi­ron­men­tally con­scious, socially respon­si­ble, low stress, non-addictive, gen­der neu­tral cel­e­bra­tion of the win­ter sol­stice hol­i­day, prac­ticed within the most enjoy­able tra­di­tion of the reli­gious per­sua­sion of your choice, or sec­u­lar prac­tices of your pref­er­ence. In addi­tion, please enjoy a fis­cally suc­cess­ful, per­son­ally ful­fill­ing and med­ically uncom­pli­cated recog­ni­tion of the onset of the gen­er­ally accepted cal­en­dar year 2008.

2007 is almost gone and tonight I wasted 10.5 min­utes of what is left watch­ing The Foun­tain. Here is my three let­ter review. WTF?

We watched Dark Side of the Rain­bow on Christ­mas day and the same three let­ter review applies here as well. One dif­fer­ence though, we watched the whole movie. But that prob­a­bly has to do with we both like Pink Floyd and the Wiz­ard of Oz.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Bar­ber of Fleet Street. I haven’t seen it and more than likely won’t. A bar­ber who slits throats and has a down­stairs neigh­bor that grinds up the car­casses to sell. WTF are peo­ple think­ing? A musical?

How does some­one whose name is Brian, who has a blog, and its main focus is Miatas, go unde­tected by me? Three let­ters. Bri­answorld.

We have zero DVDs await­ing watch­ing. Yes­ter­day we watched Flags of Our Fathers, today it was Kate & Leopold.

Leopold: Why is it called a toaster when it pro­duces no toast, but sim­ply warm bread, and insert­ing it two times pro­duces char­coal? The ideal toaster would have one and a half inser­tions to pro­duce the cor­rect toast.

This after­noon I watched Let­ters From Iwo Jima. I have one last Christ­mas gift DVD com­ing in the mail, an Ama­zon gift cer­tifi­cate from friends, that will need watch­ing — The Incred­i­bles, maybe later this week.

Now comes the daunt­ing ask of clean­ing up a years worth of worth­less pho­tos I’ve got filed away under the My Pic­tures folder…