Rants

…where nearly every sci-fi movie has gone before.

We watched Star Trek: Nemesis this afternoon. I think this is supposed to be their (The Next Generations) last movie together. After 4 of these I think they believe it is time to hang up the phasers and tricorders. I second that emotion, its about time.

When watching this movie I couldn’t help but feel that I’d seen this all before. To go along with the bald face copying of other movies: Data walking Picard down the hall as a prisoner – Star Wars. Ditto the jumping down a little chute to escape a laser battle.

We have also lapsed into the standard movie cliches of good guys in white and bad guys in black, even down to drinking from white or black tea cups. The bad guys fire 6,000 laser blasts and only manage to create sparks and charred walls, while the good guys fire 6 shots and kill 12 baddies.

Why is it that we can pick out 6 distinct little pieces of an android from light-years away, but when several bad guys beam aboard our spacecraft we have to grab some guns and search around corridors for them?

I used to be a Trekkie back in the day. I watched the Original Series when they first came on and later lived on reruns. And enjoyed the movies (even the lame-o first one) until about the 6th one. I watched all the ST:TNG episodes and now have semi-enjoyed their movies. But please no more.

Moving all the blogger entries over here was real easy thanks to the folks who wrote MT. I’m now in the process of moving The Miata Diaries over to MT as well. This one will be more time consuming, but just because I’m more anal retentive than most I guess. When importing to MT if you don’t have a title, like an indigent blogger, one will be appointed you (the first five words of the post or something.) For the rant I had been giving each post a title, but no so for the diaries. So instead of just letting it do the work I’m going back and writing titles for all the posts, like 500 (I started on January 1st, 2002)

It was fun pretending to be a newspaper headline editor, then I started picking out possible double entendres for possible high search engine hits then I got bored and cut and pasted random phrases from the text. I’m about a third of the way through and my resolve is fading fast. I am going through and fixing some of the outdated links. I’m going to try and fix the pop up windows for images too. I was using a java script thingie, but want to take advantage of the one built in to MT. Oh, well, it will keep me off the streets….

Movie afternoon here at the Bogardus Estate. Started off, by turning off, Far From Heaven 30 minutes into it. The movie captured the feel of the Fifties too well, so much so that it seemed on the edge of parody to me. I can’t explain it more that I didn’t get interested enough in the characters enough to care about their drama.

The next movie didn’t even get into the DVD player, Don’t Look Now. I originally rented after watching Donald Sutherland talk about the movie on Inside The Actor’s Studio. John Lipton effervesced over the film, plus they talked of rumors that the love scene between Donald and Julie Christie was not acting. But I forgot who was in the movie and when I read this blurb on the DVD sleeve, “John and Laura Baxter just lost their daughter in a tragic drowning accident. While living in Venice, an elderly psychic insists that she sees the spirit of the child. They’re unsure of whether to place their emotional well being in the hands of a stranger, but John begins to have psychic flashes of his own, seeing the child walk the streets of Venice. Is he insane, or is there a deeper meaning to the sightings?”, I just put it back in the envelope.

I did watch 2 movies all the way through. I had rented The Truth About Charlie and when I put it in the player it turns out I put it in upside down, as the movie on which it was based, Charade, was on that side of the disc. So what the heck, let’s watch this one first and then we can compare the two. I think that it was very stupid to include this version on the flip side because by comparison the original is a better movie than the update. Mark Walberg is a stick. Cary Grant just being his usual Cary Grant self has more on screen charisma than Marky Mark will ever have. Of course it could have been very smart to put these movies back-to-back, as it did make me watch “The Truth About Charlie” all the way through. I’m sorry I did, as the ending was muddled and seemed to have been made way different on purpose to differentiate the films.

A couple of years ago they opened a Target store in nice strip shopping center on the south side of town. There is a Goody’s, Michael’s and a year later they built Pier 1 on the end. Plus there is also smaller strip in there with a few more stores. About a month ago they started building something on the end of Pier 1. This store was bigger than everything in the shopping area, but the Target. There were rumors of a Best Buy awhile back, could this be it? Tonight while in Michael’s we asked the clerck what was coming and she replied, “Petsmart.” Both Donna and I sighed. The clerk laughed. She said that our response was typical of all the responses she got when giving that answer. I guess we would have answered differently had we been pet owners, but there already is one of those stores (Pet Warehouse, maybe) a mile up the street. We really need a Best Buy or Circuit City. The closest place to find those kinds of stores is in Augusta, 25 miles away. The only place you can buy any computer stuff is Staples for crying out loud.

And it ain’t Hillary Rodham Clinton. According to this morning’s paper around 13 million people watched Barbara Walter’s interview with the Senator. Which is approximately half the 25 point something million chuckleheads that tuned in to see Barbara Walter’s interview Monica Lewinski a few years back.

It is really tough to get tickets to the actual tournament unless you know somebody with an in or want to spend big bucks on scalped tickets. When Donna and I moved down here practice rounds were sold on the day of in unlimited amounts. We are not golfers, but not going to Augusta National when you have a chance would be like living in Indianapolis and not attend the 500. We went for the first 3 years on Monday because it was always the least attended day. After the third year the crowds were getting so big that they decided to limit the practice round tickets to a certain number (they’ve kept that a secret) by having a ticket lottery. For the next 3 years we got tickets, but for the last 7 we have been shut out. A lot of other locals that used to go regularly have also not gotten tickets in a while. There is a lot of speculation that out-of-town applications get special treatment because that way more money is pumped into the local economy. There have even urban legend type talk of people putting their out-of-town relatives addresses on the applications and they have gotten selected for tickets.

The reason I’m ranting about this April event now, is that in today’s mail, I got my application to get in the practice round ticket lottery. I am seriously considering putting my Mom’s Connecticut address on there to test the theory. It is not that I’m really desperate to get in and see the golfers or the course again, but I need a new hat. My hat from 7 years ago is getting disgusting looking. I’ve checked eBay and can’t find the right one – just the word Masters in script with no flag or year.

Last night we made it 45 minutes into Welcome to Collinwood before turning it off. This morning we only got to the 30 minute mark of All or Nothing. This got me to thinking just how many of the movies I’ve picked from Netflix have we not finished watching. Because I’m that sort of anal retentive person I have a spreadsheet that keeps track of every movie I’ve rented and how long I kept it before watching it and how many movies we average watching in a month. I went back and ran through the list and added another column for the DNF (Did Not Finish) marking. I had to look up some of them so I could remember them, but I think I got a pretty accurate count. Turns out it is pretty damn close to 20% of the movies rented were not watched all the way through.

Here is the data:
1081 Total Days Member
236 Total Movies Watched
47 Movies Not Finished
19.9% Percentage Of Movies Not Finished
6.5 Average Movies Watched Per Month
$3.23 Cost per Rental
18 Average Days Out