Eileene tried her mother’s hand at hair dying yesterday, hoping to save the cost of a professional without significant loss of results. (It came out fine.) The dye job is decidedly not natural; it’s a vivid blue. And it looks great. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t find it appealing. Admittedly, people who don’t […]
We saw Rango yesterday, an animated comedy featuring the voice of Johnny Depp as a thespian lizard who, plunged into an isolated western town, decides to pretend he’s a much tougher hombre than he is, and the hijinks that follow. I walked out of the theater feeling like I hadn’t witnessed a proper movie, but […]
The weather here has been pretty cruddy of late. An aggressive winter dumped several feet of snow on us in two or three big blasts (depending on how you count blizzards on two successive days), but New Jersey winters are pretty mild, all told, and the weather warmed and the massive snow banks retreated. In […]
I rarely pay much attention to the Academy Awards. I’m not enough of a movie fan to have strong opinions—hard to have opinions without seeing more than one film in a category—and there’s too much bullshit interfering with the stated purpose of the awards: sympathy votes for beloved actors nearing death, for example, or apology […]
Along with my fobbie, my nylon briefcase gave up the ghost, the nylon parting and shredding where seams had formed, to the point where we simply had to get another. And mostly I like it. It’s not perfect, but nothing would be; many things I want from a briefcase, like compactness and capacity, are contradictory. […]
My fobbie died on me. Perhaps I should explain; I picked up the term “fobbie†from Eileene, and I’m not sure “fobbie†is a term in widespread use. It means one of those little portable USB memory chips about the size of a finger that contain more computing power than the entire eastern seaboard in […]
Naturally, I got Eileene a card for Valentine’s Day. (No, not just a card.) It features a young girl with a dopey tongue-extended expression of concentration on her face and an electronic gadget in her hands. The caption reads something like “Hbppz Vcldmtimfs Cay!â€â€”a joke about texting and the difficulty some people have with it. […]
Also in my quest for inspirational pulp adventure, I checked out Lost Horizon, not realizing until it was in the DVD player that it was a Frank Capra movie. Yerk. Couldn’t even sit through the whole thing. This was not two-fisted adventure; it was one-fisted, and that for about half a second, in a performance […]
Seeking inspiration as a GM, I settled for Sky Captain and the City of Tomorrow. While not exactly two-fisted pulp adventure from the serials, it seeks to imitate them, and it’s readily available. “Settled for†is the appropriate term: I could recall little of the movie besides not liking it, but thinking it looked pretty […]
We’ve been watching a series of made-for-TV movies based on C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower. The stories have a reputation as ripping good yarns, which are deserved. They also have a reputation for historical accuracy and capturing the flavor of naval life in the Napoleonic era, with which I have to quarrel—although it took me […]