I don’t know why I didn’t go to see this movie when it was in the theatre. I wanted to. The people I usually go to the movies with all said they wanted to, but we just never could agree on a time. It didn’t seem urgent to us. Maybe it was because we had already been to see several movies just before it was released and seeing films at the cineplex isn’t as cheap as it used to be. For whatever reason I didn’t watch it became available on Netflix just recently. Now I wish I had seen it on the big screen.
I had a difficult time coming up with a title for this article. “Bill Maher is a Tool” and “Irrelevant TV host Seeks Attention” seemed too aggressive.
Around the time of Stan Lee’s death Bill Maher made some disparaging remarks about the mans contributions to literary entertainment and popular culture. Recently he doubled down and attacked the people who buy and read comic books, and enjoy the movies they are based on. Stating that comic books were not literature and the people who enjoyed them were eternal children who refused to grow up.
Everyone has played Trivial Pursuit by now right? I remember playing it at the cottage in the summer and my parents and their friends playing all day long on New Year’s Day. I always found it was most fun with large groups of people, broken into teams, because often are strong in one area of trivia, and weak in another. Teams make things more even, plus it’s just fun.
But if you only have a few people, or some of the players just don’t have a head full of useless trivia? How about a game where knowing the right answer is not as important as knowing who in your group might know the answer?
I’m not even sure it’s a real thing, but I got it into my head that the perfect album would be one where you can listen to it from start to finish without wanting to skip a song.
Obviously this is completely subjective. Music I like, others may hate, and even if we both love the same artist or group, we may not enjoy the same songs.
Do you like playing games, but always have this one person you play with who is hyper competitive and kind of makes the experience less fun? One of my all time favorite games is a co-operative game. Instead of playing against each other, you work as a team to defeat the game. It has an incredible amount of randomness in it’s setup, so the replay factor is huge. In short, you don’t have to worry about one person winning every time you play and rubbing it everyones face, and you won’t get bored playing the same exact game time after time. That’s why I love Elder Signs.
Robert Asprin is one of my favorite authors. I know I say that about a lot of writers but I would easily put him in my top five. Probably best known for his Myth series (books which got my dyslexic son to actually enjoy reading), he also wrote a four volume series with Linda Evans (not that Linda Evans, this Linda Evans).
Time Scout, Wagers of Sin, Ripping Time and The House That Jack Built are the (sadly only) four books that make up the Time Scout series. The premise is this. In the future there is an unnamed catastrophe that fractures time and space sending rips backwards in time that lead to different eras and locations. These portals open and close either randomly, or on predictable schedules. Sometimes clumps of them can be found in one area and stations are built around them called Time Terminals. What do you do with portals in time? Time Tourism!
I like cooking shows. It’s fun to learn new recipes and get ideas for meals, it’s even better when they expose you to techniques and styles of cuisine you might not ordinarily encounter. My favorite of all cooking shows though has always been Alton Browns Good Eats.
I didn’t catch the show when it first premiered on Food Network in 1999, I think it wasn’t until the third or fourth season that I started watching (I was late to that party, as usual) but I fell in love with it immediately. Good Eats wasn’t just another celebrity chef giving you a bunch of recipes, each episode was a cooking class, it was a testing lab, it was an equipment review, a history lesson, it was one of the best resources for culinary information I have ever come across. Even better than all the Dummies books I had been buying.
It came down to cost, versus how much use I got out of it. The radio in my car has an XM receiver built into it and every now and then they do a two week free service test for people who have their radios. I listened to the comedy channels while they were unlocked and I enjoyed them while in traffic. I asked for and recieved a subscription for Christmas last year. It was a package that came with a radio and originally I thought the subscription could just be moved to my car. Nope. Sirius forced me to install this 2nd radio in my car just to listen to the service already paid for. The free subscription was not transferable.
But I liked it. I found I didn’t use it much on the morning drive to work as I preferred to listen to the local news, but on the drive home, when traffic is worse, it was preferable to the radio. I especially enjoyed the comedy stations and the Classic Vinyl channel.
Okay, so maybe I’m not done yet with the magician theme.
When I first saw this movie in the theater, I liked it. I didn’t love it, but it was fun, it was funny, I liked the characters and the plot made sense. Best part was that it turned out not to be a Nicholas Cage movie. He’s in it, he has a major role, but it’s really a Jay Baruchel movie and I like Jay.
Jays character of Dave Stutler is very similar to Hiccup, for whom he does the voice of in the How to Train Your Dragon series. Smart but awkward people who have trouble relating to others. I really wish there had been a sequel because I wanted to see where his character would go.
What really made me appreciate this movie more was watching it again after Marvels Dr. Strange. Now don’t get me wrong, I love Benedict Cumberbatch as Stephen Strange and he was even better in Avengers: Infinity War (which shows how important directors are), but the one thing that bothered me about the movie was how weak and unimaginative the “magic battles” were. Seriously, go watch the movie again, it’s great, but aside from the Inception like imagery, most of the fights between awesome wizards boils down to kung-fu with glowy weapons. Afterwards go watch The Sorcerers Apprentice and you’ll see the difference. The writers and director just let their imaginations off the leash. It’s even better (and you can just keep your outraged hate mail to yourself) than the fights in the Harry Potter movies.
It’s been eight years since the movie was released, so it seems unlikely there will be a follow up at this late a date. From all reports it cost $150 million to make and made more than that internationally, but only $64 million at the US box office. It seems like, despite it turning a profit, because it was not a smash success at home, the mouse house doesn’t want to continue the story, which is a shame.
I asked Alexa to show me some cooking shows and this was near the top of her list. The premise sounded good. A group of ex-convicts get a chance to start new careers in the restaurant business. Jamie Oliver did something similar in 2002, for at risk youths, when he opened Fifteen. I thought this would be great. I was wrong.
Late to the party, as usual 