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We were on our trip in August when this came out, so last week I picked up a couple of pizzas and the movie on BluRay and we had our first movie night in a while (yes, even Jamie watched) upstairs in the purple room. Collin got a little scared, but other than that everyone did fine.
We really liked it - I could not figure out how they could make the premise (actually the costume) plausible, but they did it.
I posted a few weeks ago about how pleased I was to get back one of the two wooden aircraft carrier toys that my dad and I made for my cousins' sons back in 1993, the Lexington. Yesterday I was able to retrieve the sister ship Saratoga and brought it back home to surprise Collin and Parker when they get back tomorrow.
These pictures aren't quite as good as the original, taken of the sister ships off Diamond Head in 1932, but they're close!
I still can't believe how good they look in the water. And they float just like they were designed to - most 2 x 6s (which is what they are - a selectively hollowed out 2 x 6 topped by a 1/4" piece of plywood with a 1x cut on a band saw, I think it was, for an island) just don't look this good in the water.
Both are in immaculate condition - which tells you how horrified my cousins were when I told them these were "toys" for their kids, and how quickly they probably went into storage so they wouldn't get broken. I strongly suspect neither ever saw the lake water they were designed for - we spent hours selectively hollowing the hulls out to counterbalance the weight of the island and calculating where the waterline would be so it could be painted on correctly, so they would float just like the real thing.
That, incidentally, is why the proportions are so far off - we were deliberately making stable raft-like toys that had flight decks that would accommodate the die-cast metal planes kids play with without rolling over, so the ships have very wide beams and the island structures are oversized for show. Each has arresting gear, life rafts, anchors, life boats and so forth painted on with paint markers. We could have made the turrets turn, but thought it would be better to have no moving parts to break off. I would have been more logical to make modern carriers with these wide decks, but I've always liked these two ships, especially in their bright prewar colors, and thought they'd look good.
People really shouldn't leave me at home alone (Jamie's watching musical in Dallas this afternoon and boys are coming back from balloon-watching in Albuquerque) behind I get lonesome and sad and actually go to Walmart after church for entertainment - and there's no telling what I'll buy.
Today's haul was a "couch mouse" for the new stand-up desk at the office, so I can scroll on my pants (it sounds dirty but really, it's not), the new Star Wars Blu-Rays for the herd (we srated watching Episode I before they left and by the time we got to the pod race we'd all decided that standard def on the study TV just was not cutting it), and the proverbial missing links for the home theater.
When we put in the home theater room when we built the house, we included two Cat 5e and two coax runs all the way from the wiring closet - surely that's be plenty, right? But for some reason I can't seem to connect the right cables to hook the movie room's Blu-Ray player to the router in the wiring closet so it can access the Internet and get to the Netflix and Amazon Instant Video features that I have available in the study and in our bedroom (which use a Roku, I have to point out) and which I use a lot. And because I was expecting I could, the new Blu-Ray player I got doesn't have wifi - I figured I wouldn't need it. And because the wiring closet is pretty much on the opposite end of the house, the wireless signal couldn't get to the movie room anyway, and the last time I tried to fix this problem I couldn't find a signal extender, nor did the wifi USB device for the Blu-Ray player actually work.
Well, with electronics, just wait a few weeks and they'll come out with the right gadgets to fix anything. Today our local Walmart had a Netgear Universal WiFi Range Extender, with a 4 port WiFi adapter. I plugged it in in Grayson's room, and it got a good connection to the new Cisco router I put in this summer using the WPS button. I then plugged the Universal Wireless Internet Adapter
into the Blu-Ray player in the movie room, and again hit the WPS button and it picked up the extender signal. I then turned on the projector and ran the setup and damned if the thing didn't fire up and connect on the very first try. Never had that happen before. I started up Netflix and Amazon, and both ran just fine. The audio didn't work at first, but I discovered it didn't work with a DVD either - the old "TV & DVD" setting on the receiver was the culprit, and I found and corrected it. I then sat down to watch the next episode of Bones on Amazon and a Star Trek animated episode ("Jihad") on Netflix just to test things out. It's just weird going from a ten inch iPad screen or 40" study TV screen to a six-foot projected image. I feel like I've just had an inappropriate relationship with Emily Deschanel because I've seen details in her face that nobody but her husband ought to see. (The Star Trek was animated, but I still feel oddly closer to William Shatner).
I still can't believe it worked - and I'm now downloading and streaming wirelessly over about 100' in what looks to me to be high-def, and I did it by myself (granted it took seven years). That's important because the screen in the movie room dwarfs everything else in the house, and the audio setup is better than anywhere else - even the study - with the six speakers positioned where they should be. So if we really want to watch a streaming movie, we have a good place to do it. At one point I was even doing it while using the same wi-fi network to watch the Eagles and Giants games on DirecTV Sunday Ticket on the iPad - which just got scary. That's way too much media content to have in your hands.
Okay, I am not joking. When you have a jones as bad as I do for Dairy Queen Butterfinger Blizzards, but you live in a town that for some inexplicable reason has no Dairy Queen (it had two when I was growing up - what is the problem, people!) discovering this ice cream ranks right up there with the best things in life.
This ice cream is not the cruel tease of a Sonic Butterfinger Blast (whipped cream? WTF?), but the full and rich flavor of the real deal. Granted, the ice cream is not true soft serve, but Blue Bell's vanilla base is the creme de la creme on ice cream to me (I actually do not do flavors in Blue Bell for that reason).
The website says that this is a seasonal flavor, which sucks pretty bad right there, but the same Internet search led me to the existence of BB BC ice cream bars, which may do the job instead.
Anyway, have to report on the important things is life here.
Okay, you already know I like Castle. In part because it reminds me of the sort of sexual tension they did so well on Moonlight. And if you like that, you'll probably also like The Mentalist, although I still can't like it too much because it replaced the sets of Moonlight when the latter was cancelled. But when you keep buying episodes and seasons of Castle, you get bombarded with Bones as a "you may like" series, and I kept remembering this one great promo for Bones that reminded me that Emily Deschanel is on it. Who I liked not for her own merits (at the time) but because her mom was on Twin Peaks (turns out her dad directed some episodes as well) and her sister Zooey was achingly hot on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (that is not a commonly expressed opinion, I have to admit, but let's be honest - she would certainly make life after having your home planet blown up survivable. That was actually a major problem I had with the film, because Arthur's post-apocalypse life with her was a big improvement over the pre-planet blowup one. The shower scene still doesn't make much sense, though - maybe they were filming for a parallel R-version that never got released. Am I the only one that has these thoughts? Whatever. Time to leave the parenthetical).
Back to Bones. I looked it up on Netflix after watching all the back episodes of Castle almost a year ago, and have been devouring episodes ever since - usually watching on the iPad while exercising in the mornings. I'm now partway through season 6, which isn't available on Netflix so I had to buy it on Amazon's Instant Video. It's not up to the production or writing standards of Castle (the first episode of this season being a significant aberration on that front on the writing side, but I'm not going to get into that) and it's nearly slapstick at times, but it appears to have been a deliberate take-off on the CSI-type dramas in that it incorporates a lot of humor. That took a while to get used to, but I really like the cast (Michaela Conlin you can't take your eyes off of, and T.J. Thyne and John Francis Daly are always fun to watch) and the back and forth between Bones and Booth is always entertaining. So, a good guilty pleasure.
The conceit here is that this is a historical novel about the real Dracula, which dispenses completely with any vampire overlay, and simply historicizes the Impaler to try to show why he might have done the things he did, i.e. killing and impaling thousands while fighting the keep his kingdowm from both the Turks and his fellow Christian princes. It's a well written book - provides an interesting narration of his time as a young man in the Turkish court held as a hostage for his father's good behavior. It's significant that I have it marked as fiction - with the exception of about half a dozen historical facts we know about the historical Vlad it's a complete fiction. It might be reasonably accurate in some particulars, or it might not. But this Crimean War book is just so slow I had to get some trashy horror-ish fiction back into my diet.
Just finished my second Temperance Brennan novel, and really didn't like it any better than the first. The plot-heavy book is just hard to follow in an audiobook format - the names run together and I realized how much trouble the audio format in one respect - you can't tell when something is a proper noun and when it isn't. For example I heard repeated references to the "foot farm" and the "Palmer cousins" and couldn't make heads or tails of either not until late in the book when I realized it was "the Foote farm" and "Mr. Palmer Cousins."
Again, this is a "but only if under ten dollars" kind of audiobook. The writing is good (once you get past the first few pages, which are sugar-sweet with metaphors) but it's just not much fun to listen to. I keep being reminded that the book Temperance is middle-aged and has a college-aged daughter, and while let's get real - that's my current demographic - I prefer the TV version with Emily Deschanel.
Any student of the Pacific war sees this book on used bookstore shelves. Since the older I get the more I am interested in stories of the war that aren't at the theater or battle level, I picked up a copy a year or two ago, but hadn't found a chance to read it yet. When I saw it in unabridged audiobook two weeks ago I picked it up, knowing I had some long car trips coming up.
I'm glad I did. Previously I just knew Manchester as the author of The Death of a President about the JFK assassination, and I may start looking for his other books now, as this was quite simply the best war book I have ever read. Similar to James Jones WWII, it is a former Marine's memoir, but it isn't just a story of what he saw - it is the story of his visit back to the sites of the World War II battlefields in the Pacific to try to exorcise his own personal demons. It's an intense book, and wel-organized, although you don't realize that till the afterword where the author explains that he deliberately didn't tell the story in chronological fashion.
