I've had the new brand new album for a while now but never really listened to it. I didn't much like their last album (the devil and god are playing inside me), so I had low expectations going in. The huge problem with this album is that track 1 is terrible! What a producing mistake that was. It's like putting the dreary "No Seatbelt Song" at the beginning of the album. Nobody would make it past that. So after like a year, somehow I listened past the first song, and there's actually some good stuff later.

I think I like this song "At the Bottom" the most out of all of Brand New's songs. Excellent imagery.

(from a user review The Sure Thing)
The first ten minutes of Reiner's commentary are a must-listen if you rent this for two hilarious moments:
1) when he confesses to having been unable to direct the opening sequence because Nicollette Sheridan (the cover girl) was in a bikini and, in auditions had told him "You can't handle it" when he'd asked to see her body--and he agreed; and
2) when he says that John Cusack reminds him of himself then WITHOUT A BEAT proceeds to praise the young actor's tremendous intelligence, sense of humor, good looks, and sex appeal. Well worth it.

Watching Hancock while I eat dinner. I'm only gonna watch the first half because I have to do work, and the second half is terrible. How can a movie start so interesting and end so terribly? Will Smith does okay with his scowling and occasionally interesting interactions with Jason Bateman. Charlize Theron acts weird and annoying the whole time, not unlike Edward Cullen's wide-eyed constipated look when he first meets Bella. I guess that's the look for supernatural attraction. Jason Bateman carries the movie. Him and special effects.

Back to work.

(from a user review of Road to Perdition)
Those who are turned off by Road to Perdition because of the bloody deeds performed by Hollywood Good Fella Hanks, akin to watching Jimmy Stewart in the role of someone who kicks puppies, are perhaps missing the point.

Not a lot of time today, but I just installed windows 7 on my new desktop. Not super impressed with how windows is getting more gelled and less.. useful. The control panel at least is sparse. Maybe there are more controls hidden a little deeper. Anyway, the computer is still in pieces on my carpet, I just plugged most of the together and made sure it was all working. It seems to be. The windows experience index loves my computer. After this month I'm going to put Civ 5 on it.

I know I've been missing for a while, but I'm going to continue to be MIA until the end of the month. Busy with work. Go read Rachel's Africa posts instead.

(part of a very long user review of Breaking Dawn, the last book of the Twilight series)
Remember the template in the other books? 'Happy, happy...Just kidding! SAD!!' Well in this one it was... 'ok plot ok writing... Just kidding! I SUCK!'

As usual there is nothing worth watching on tv. Only king of the hill, but I have it on dvd anyway. So instead I'm trying to watch some semi-crappy movies on comcast on-demand (Pathfinder and then My Super Ex-Girlfriend). Now it looks like the movies on there are both censored and have commercials! What! Why would I want commercials on demand? F cable tv. I only ever got it because kate liked to watch tv. This week I'll call comcast and see about canceling it.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend is funnier than I thought it was going to be. By that I mean it's mildly entertaining. I got lunch with Amelia last Thursday and she told me how she thought her ex might have copied her apartment key, so she was going to get all her locks changed. I've never had a crazy ex though. I wonder how common it really is.

My desktop computer might have completely died via overheating. I'll find out tomorrow. I should have installed a case fan long ago.

(From an article about the best sitcoms on tv, an entry about Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia)
Your jaw will drop and you’ll squirm in your seat when you hear Frank dismiss his daughter Dee’s pregnancy with a deadpan “Do yourself a favor and flush it out.”

No trivia today because Rachel ate some ground up glass in her lunch, much like Charlie Wilson's dog in that movie. So instead I'm watching a bunch of bad movies, just to confirm that they're bad and I want to get rid of them.

So far the list is:
The Sure Thing - John Cusack's first lead role as an annoying college freshman. The girl from Spaceballs is in it as the prudish girl he likes. Besides one scene where he pretends to be a crazy hitchhiker, there's really nothing funny about the movie. All John Cusack's pickup attempts are unfunny and uninteresting. And the cross-country shenanigans are unmemorible.

Stargate - The first half of this movie is decent science fiction. Then it turns into a standard sort of rebellion movie and you seee that with all his advanced technology, really Ra just has jet airplanes and guns shaped like sticks. The alien horse-animals look terrible, even by 1990's standards, and the annoying kid actors are given way too much screen time. I think it must take all of a director's and writer's work to make child characters not be annoying. You just can't do it when you've got a dozen of them. A dozen kids in the same movie will ruin the picture, unless they're only in it for a few minutes. One of these kids was supposed to be the mentally handicapped of the group, and there's a slow motion death scene where he's running toward the other kids and the other kids are yelling at him to hurry. Then he got shot. The scene was ineffective and I was just glad the character had finally been killed off. It would have been a better movie if James Spader had shot the kid's character when he was first introduced to the kid.

Eastern Promises - Decent movie, just something I would definitely not watch more than once and didn't even really enjoy watch it the first time. Lots of abused women. Lots of distant, cold characters who pretend to be friendly while they're cold, terrible people on the inside. Apparently the Russian mafia is not as warm and likable as the Italian mafia. But it's only like half a Russian mafia movie, the other half is a "it sucks to be a girl in a russian village" movie. I do like the gay mobster's son character. He was well played.

Tomorrow is my sister Irene's birthday and I have no idea what to get her. She likes art... You all get upset when you don't know what kind of gift to get for me, well imagine being in my shoes. I never know what to get anybody!

(girl on Dating in the Dark)
Appearance is very important to me. I need to be attracted to a guy. I can't have somebody grow on me... like a fungus!

Watching Dating in the Dark. Without whitney because she's cancelled on me. The problem with this show is that the girls range from somewhat attractive to quite attractive. It's like you aren't even risking anything by going into the dark. There's one episode where a guy thinks one girl is fat and so he rules her out, but he's wrong and she's pretty cute. (When the guy traced her outline and found out she was fairly thin he tried to be charmingly honest and quickly destroyed the date. Apparently it doesn't always go over well when you confess to a girl that you've been calling her fat nicknames with the other guys, even if you're sorry now.)

I've yet to see an episode where a guy thinks he likes a girl, but then see's her in the light and decides against her.

The whole "expert's compatibility score" thing is clearly bs. I wonder if, before they had that feature on the show, none of the guys or girls could make a decision about any particular person and the whole thing just floundered around.

This was a good episode. I thought the dufus-looking guy was going to repel the ladies with his silly suspenders and jeans look (it's like he modeled his style after Duckie from Pretty in Pink), but the girls both thought he was "perfect looking". Girls are strange.

Kathryn (to Kaylee): You're a liar!
mom: Kathryn! Don't teach her that word!

I watched The Kids Are All Right (a movie I always mix up with the Local H song All the Kids are Right), with Dave and Huyen. Pretty good movie, except the resolution was a little unjust. It was their last night in the states so afterwards we got some pizza, shook hands, and see you in a couple years. It was a sad night but the weather was super nice so I walked around dc a bit.

This new hard drive has proved to be like poison for my computer. It was working well for a week or two and then, starting yesterday, problems galore.

First it suddenly started causing a super long delay in the post, so long that my computer would get to the windows loading, and then timeout and shutoff before I can log in. Then it burned out my psu, but luckily I had a spare in the closet. Then it caused my ram to overheat so that my computer would reboot but then refuse to even find the ram. (I wasn't sure about this until I touched the ram and almost burned my finger. I'm not sure if that problem is with the new hd, new psu, or old ram.) But everything seems to work fine when the hd isn't attached. Windows also doesn't find the drive when I hook it up with a usb adapter. My laptop seems to find the disk when I hook it up using this external media player, and it looks like all the data is still on there and everything. Now I'm running chkdsk again (I ran it when I first got the drive), but it doesn't look like it's finding anything. One file with bad sectors so far is all. It's going on 7 hours now of chkdsk, hopefully it's almost done. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when it comes back as "okay" but my desktop still refuses to read it.

(Undeclared's Ron about You've Got Mail)
"It's just pleasant. It's like waves lapping at a shore or something. It's like they're emailing each other and they don't know, they're all connecting. It's like us bonding, Lloyd, it's beautiful."