TDPM

About A Hugh

This morning the Emperor and I went out to buy a paper. We stopped getting home delivery of the Aiken Standard the other week because they weren’t getting here in time for our breakfast reading, so on the weekends I drive over to a local convenience store and buy a copy. Today was my lucky day and possibly someone else’s unlucky day. Sitting on top of the paper box was a copy of the Standard. No one was anywhere to be seen, so not wanting the wind to scatter all that newsprint around I picked up my complimentary copy. And seeing as my pocket was laden with quarters I lightened the load by buying a copy of The State. Other than standing on the threshold of the garage door, Donna hasn’t been outside at all.

What did I learn from all this newspaper reading? Hillary Clinton is coming to town. Do you want to know why? It’s the Aiken Factor – whoever visits town takes over as the Democrat front runner.

Her closet competitor, Sen. Barack Obama, who appeared in Aiken last month, just recently pulled ahead of Clinton by four points in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll for Iowa.

Watched another Kissy-Poo Movie™ this afternoon, About A Boy, do I even have to tell you the kind of character Hugh Grant played? Didn’t think so. He, like Vince Vaughan, play only one character in every movie they are in. The only change is the character’s name. That’s it. If I was writing an entry for Wikipedia I would be hard pressed to choose which one’s picture should go next to the entry for “One Dimensional.” That said, Hugh is not as annoying to me as Vince is, so I slightly enjoyed the movie.

A movie I did enjoy this afternoon, even though I came in at about 1/4 in mark:

Elizabeth: Parlay. I invoke the right of parlay. According to the Code of the brethren, set down by the pirates Morgan and Bartholomew, you have to take me to your Captain.

That’s right, the Scifi Channel was showing TDPM.

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69,000 Pieces of Aztec Gold

Last night we turned the clocks back and took advantage of that extra hour to sleep it away. But somehow, even though we got moving this morning at the “normal” time, it seemed like we were an hour behind all day.

Might have been the time we spent walking around at the Cowpens National Battlefield or it could have been time spent walking a block of downtown Gaffney looking for a Post Office or it could have been the time spent circling Newberry looking for a lunch place before ending up at Taco Bell or maybe it was…

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.
We pillage, we plunder, we rifle, and loot,
Drink up, me ‘earties, yo ho.
We kidnap and ravage and don’t give a hoot,
Drink up me ‘earties, yo ho.

I told her not to do it, but she did it anyway, Donna switched the channel over to USA at 8:00PM tonight and another 20 minutes were lost — watching the beginning of TDPM.

Somewhere between Carlisle and Union the Emperor kicked over 69,000 miles. With 3 weeks to go until HRH’s 4th birthday he may even reach the 70k mark before then.

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Pretty Full Day

  1. Breakfast in Aiken
    • We went to the New Moon and came to the conclusion that we are still eating there because of past performance. My muffin, while good, was not heated nearly enough. Donna’s hot chocolate had to be requested a second time before being served. If our last 3 visits here, were our first three visits here, they would be our only 3 visits here.
  2. Walk in Hitchcock Woods
    • Instead of our usual ingress point we started at the South Boundary entrance because we were already downtown for breakfast. A beautiful fall day and we shared the 2,000 acres with a horsewoman and her dog plus another woman walking a couple of small dogs. As is usually the case with our walks in the woods, we were certain of our path for approximately 75% of the time, never actually lost, just sometimes not sure where we were in relationship to the map.
  3. Pack the car and head north
    • I am constantly amazed with how much stuff we can stuff in the small trunk of the Miata. I am also constantly amazed with how much stuff we have to take with us for being away from home for a mere 48 hours.
  4. Lunch in Newberry, SC
    • The Grill On Main serves a mean Patty Melt. Donna had a cup of vegetable soup and a half of a chicken salad sandwich. The chicken salad had some mustard and maybe thyme in there to give it a different twist.
  5. Photographed 5 Post Offices
    • Whitmire, Union, Buffalo, Jonesville, Pacolet & Pacolet Mills. We stopped at White Stone, but it was busy and it had enough character that we decided to come back on the way home Sunday when it might not have cars in front of it.
  6. Dinner in Asheville Fletcher, NC
    • We had pizza from the second place we tried. We drove the 4 miles to a place just inside the Asheville limits that had some good reviews I found on the web. We left after we never got any attention from a server after being seated. That and the dozen small ants that crawled out of the menus and had to be squished under our fingers. The next place we tried was take out only so we ended up dining in our room at the Fairfield Inn in Fletcher, NC. The pie was not bad and probably would have been better if we could have eaten it moments out of the oven instead of the 15 minutes or so later that it took us to get back to the hotel and get settled.
  7. TDPM on USA
    • Commodore Norrington: No additional shot nor powder, a compass that doesn’t point north, [looks at Jack’s sword] and I half expected it to be made of wood. You are without doubt the worst pirate I’ve ever heard of.
      Captain Jack Sparrow: But you have heard of me.
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Bloody Pirates

The DescentThe image you see here is from the opening credits of the movie The Descent which finished last weekend 8th on the box office money list taking in $4.62 million. It didn’t get any help from me because I have a copy of the DVD in the laptop right now. I may or may not finish watching it, I just shut it off about halfway thru after one of the women spelunkers fell down a hole and suffered a compound leg fracture. Last night Donna and I watched a slightly muddy copy of The Break-Up with Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston. I don’t think this movie is still in theaters, but you can’t rent it yet. These movies were borrowed from someone at work who bought them at a local flea market.

Matter of fact a co-worker (Hi, Mark!) said his son bought Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest the Saturday after the movie was released in theaters. Bloody pirates.

Jack Sparrow: The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can’t do. For instance, you can accept that your father was a pirate and a good man or you can’t. But pirate is in your blood, boy, so you’ll have to square with that some day. And me, for example, I can let you drown, but I can’t bring this ship into Tortuga all by me onesies, savvy? So, can you sail under the command of a pirate, or can you not?

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Captain Jack Will Get You High Tonight

A wedding?My Jack Sparrow doll action figure has gone from being alone to sharing the spotlight with Davy Jones, to battling ol’ Davy for monitor top supremacy, to standing solo again. Somewhere along the way he has lost his trusty cutlass, so now his only job is to hold up a selection of pithy quotes from the two Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

Today’s quote was especially on point, as this morning I got a request to scan and OCR an old wedding program for a maid of honor co-worker. She wanted to use that particular format and change the words to match the ones needed for her friend’s upcoming betrothal. “Oh,” she asks, “can you change the holding hands to a glass slipper while you are at it?” No problem at all. My summer intern doesn’t call me the Arts & Crafts Engineer for nothing.

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43,000 Names on the Wall

43,000 Names on the WallSince last Thursday a 1/2 scale version of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been set up in a park not to far from our house. The Wall That Heals travels around the country allowing folks who can’t or won’t make the trip to the actual memorial in Washington DC. Donna and I visited the actual Wall way back in the early 80’s when it had not been open for very long, so we thought it might be cool to see this version too. Because the traveling wall, like the original, is open 24 hours a day, we decided to wait until 10PM or so last night to visit, so we could take advantage of the cool night air. Plus there is something about the memorial that makes a visit in darkness more fitting.

I know, there are actually over 58,000 names engraved on the Wall, but 43,000 works better for me here because that is the amount of miles the Emperor has traveled in it’s lifetime. Passed through that mark on the way home from Augusta this morning.

We went over to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie at an early morning showing in a theater with stadium seating. I enjoyed it more than Donna did, but we still felt it was worth the time, money and effort to see it in an actual movie theater instead of waiting for the DVD. Not as much humor and not nearly as many quotable lines. There was a lot more action, some of it bordering on the unbelievable. I say bordering, because after all, if you can except that Davy Jones has the head of an octopus, one hand that is a lobster claw and his still beating heart is locked in a buried chest miles away on a dessert isle, how can three men carrying out a raging sword fight on a 25′ water wheel as it rolls down a hill be unbelievable?

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It’s An Action Figure, Not A Doll

From the trailer to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest due in theaters July 7th.

Elizabeth Swann: There will come a moment when you have the chance to do the right thing.
Jack Sparrow: I love those moments. I like to wave at them as they pass by.

The merchandising is already starting to crank up. We were in Target the other night looking for a swim cap for Donna. She wanted to go to our health club and swim in the pool and didn’t want to frighten any other swimmers with her recently shorn pate. We found a couple different ones to choose from and opted for the more expensive silicone one over the vinyl. Right next to the sporting goods was the toy section where the end of one aisle was loaded with boxes full of “Talking Mr. Cotton’s Parrots” and skull & crossbones alarm clocks. I wandered further down the aisle and found some TDPM II action figures. There was a sword slashing Jack Sparrow that I just had to have, it was destiny, Cap’t Jack was $7.99, exactly what the swim cap cost…

In other movie news: This September you will be able to step back to 1977 and relive the greatest movie of all time the way it was presented back then. That’s right, just in time for winter solstice gift giving season, the Star Wars Trilogy as they were originally run in the movie theaters arrive as “bonus” material on 2-disc DVD sets of each title.

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