Rants

This last Saturday as part of the Peach Festival Parade there were a couple of Plymouth Prowlers as an entry. One was being pulled on a trailer. I guess this guy figured that by not driving this one around it will be worth money someday. It probably hasn’t ever been driven except maybe on and off that trailer, he still had the original window sticker on the windshield.

Prowlers are fairly rare and if he finds just the right collector he may get a few bucks for it, but I think my retirement strategy of buying lottery tickets will pay off sooner than his expected windfall.

I guess I really am a glutton for punishment. I ordered several stickers from the CafePress store for this blog and some from the Miata Diaries store as well on the 14th of June. On the 17th their status was “In Production.” One week later they were still In Production, so I called their Customer Service number. After a not too long of a wait the CSR told me that they were having a slight problem with the sticker material not printing right so that everyone’s sticker orders were delayed. She informed me that my order was going out today.

The last time I called about a delayed “In Production” order, I received my original order and then several days later I got a second shirt via UPS second day. They never charged for the 2nd shirt and I never said anything. Maybe I’ll get 2 orders of stickers. If I do I’ll report it here and I’ll give the doubles away.

…where nearly every sci-fi movie has gone before.

We watched Star Trek: Nemesis this afternoon. I think this is supposed to be their (The Next Generations) last movie together. After 4 of these I think they believe it is time to hang up the phasers and tricorders. I second that emotion, its about time.

When watching this movie I couldn’t help but feel that I’d seen this all before. To go along with the bald face copying of other movies: Data walking Picard down the hall as a prisoner – Star Wars. Ditto the jumping down a little chute to escape a laser battle.

We have also lapsed into the standard movie cliches of good guys in white and bad guys in black, even down to drinking from white or black tea cups. The bad guys fire 6,000 laser blasts and only manage to create sparks and charred walls, while the good guys fire 6 shots and kill 12 baddies.

Why is it that we can pick out 6 distinct little pieces of an android from light-years away, but when several bad guys beam aboard our spacecraft we have to grab some guns and search around corridors for them?

I used to be a Trekkie back in the day. I watched the Original Series when they first came on and later lived on reruns. And enjoyed the movies (even the lame-o first one) until about the 6th one. I watched all the ST:TNG episodes and now have semi-enjoyed their movies. But please no more.

Moving all the blogger entries over here was real easy thanks to the folks who wrote MT. I’m now in the process of moving The Miata Diaries over to MT as well. This one will be more time consuming, but just because I’m more anal retentive than most I guess. When importing to MT if you don’t have a title, like an indigent blogger, one will be appointed you (the first five words of the post or something.) For the rant I had been giving each post a title, but no so for the diaries. So instead of just letting it do the work I’m going back and writing titles for all the posts, like 500 (I started on January 1st, 2002)

It was fun pretending to be a newspaper headline editor, then I started picking out possible double entendres for possible high search engine hits then I got bored and cut and pasted random phrases from the text. I’m about a third of the way through and my resolve is fading fast. I am going through and fixing some of the outdated links. I’m going to try and fix the pop up windows for images too. I was using a java script thingie, but want to take advantage of the one built in to MT. Oh, well, it will keep me off the streets….

Movie afternoon here at the Bogardus Estate. Started off, by turning off, Far From Heaven 30 minutes into it. The movie captured the feel of the Fifties too well, so much so that it seemed on the edge of parody to me. I can’t explain it more that I didn’t get interested enough in the characters enough to care about their drama.

The next movie didn’t even get into the DVD player, Don’t Look Now. I originally rented after watching Donald Sutherland talk about the movie on Inside The Actor’s Studio. John Lipton effervesced over the film, plus they talked of rumors that the love scene between Donald and Julie Christie was not acting. But I forgot who was in the movie and when I read this blurb on the DVD sleeve, “John and Laura Baxter just lost their daughter in a tragic drowning accident. While living in Venice, an elderly psychic insists that she sees the spirit of the child. They’re unsure of whether to place their emotional well being in the hands of a stranger, but John begins to have psychic flashes of his own, seeing the child walk the streets of Venice. Is he insane, or is there a deeper meaning to the sightings?”, I just put it back in the envelope.

I did watch 2 movies all the way through. I had rented The Truth About Charlie and when I put it in the player it turns out I put it in upside down, as the movie on which it was based, Charade, was on that side of the disc. So what the heck, let’s watch this one first and then we can compare the two. I think that it was very stupid to include this version on the flip side because by comparison the original is a better movie than the update. Mark Walberg is a stick. Cary Grant just being his usual Cary Grant self has more on screen charisma than Marky Mark will ever have. Of course it could have been very smart to put these movies back-to-back, as it did make me watch “The Truth About Charlie” all the way through. I’m sorry I did, as the ending was muddled and seemed to have been made way different on purpose to differentiate the films.