Ho Ho Ho, Motherfucker Most of you will remember that line from what some consider to be the best Christmas movie of all time, the classic Bruce Willis Die Hard. The original was made in 1988 based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever, written in 1979. Well, the Die Hard series tried to disprove that with no less than four sequels, Die Hard 2 (1990), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Live Free or Die…
The Mail The movie The Postman, starring Kevin Costner, got broadly dissed when it was released. That was in 1997 and looking at its IMDb Metascore of 29, I think its fair to say that it also hasn’t aged particularly well. Nonetheless, I’m, generally a fan of Costner’s and I really quite like the movie. I think what I like most about the movie is what it says about civilization as we know it. It…
Breaking Bad I am fifteen years behind in finally watching Breaking Bad, but I have now done it over the past few weeks and I see what all the fuss was about since it was a riveting series. I am a big fan of strong titling and I must admit that this title always intrigued me because it was never clear form the outside exactly what it meant. The implication was that someone (presumably Walter…
Deer Busters I am sure that we all get more unwanted emails than we used to. They and spam texts and calls are the annoying marketing realities of our times the way TV ads were in our youth. In the old days some people relished TiVoing all their favorite TV shows just so they could remove the ads and watch them straight through. That always seemed like more work than just putting up with them.…
Ribbit I have had an episodic relationship over the years with frogs. As a kid who spent six of his first seven years of life in the tropics, frogs were a daily part of life. I’m sure they were all over the place in Venezuela, but where I remember first encountering them with high frequency was in that little tropical valley in Costa Rica, where we lived for two years. I’m not being entirely accurate…
Modern Family It’s that time of year when we all gather as families on one occasion or another. I know fewer and further traditional families and then today I see that there is a new sitcoms being aired this season that is based on how to make a divorce work successfully for you. I am the product of divorce and Kim comes from a more traditional nuclear family, but none of that causes or prevents…
The Full Spectrum I have written before about my old problem’s with Verizon and AT&T and trying to cancel services that these companies simply don’t want to cancel. They seem to have a business model predicated less on keeping customers happy than on making sure that it is as hard as humanly possible to cancel their service and thus stop paying them their monthly tariff. Usually, after holding incessantly on the phone for a representative,…
Gray Grey Day Here in America, we live our lives for the most part in the gray, much less so than the grey. Do you know the difference? I didn’t until I Googled it and found out that it is one of the most commonly queried words in the English language because both spellings look right to us. The only difference between the two, which are both very commonly used, is that gray appears more…
What’s Up With Ping Pong? When I was a kid of about five years old, we lived in Costa Rica, which meant that many of the standard American games and conventions were missing from our daily lives. We had bikes and simple toys, but we would do crazy things that the local kids did for fun like dragging a dead snake behind a bicycle. I don’t really remember whether my mother remembered to bring things…
The Birkenstock Dream This evening we are watching a movie we know that we have seen before, but which is less than fully memorable to us since so much of it is subtitled. It is the 2022 film called The Swimmers, and it is a real story about two Syrian girls that are trained Olympic swimmers. It tells the harrowing tale of their escape from war-torn Damascus, leaving their family behind for the time being,…