Saturday comes on Monday

It feels like Saturday. The weekend was taken up with very non-weekend-ish things, I guess. Or maybe it's just being 2 days away from back to work.

Did some shopping, Orchard supply, Target, Fry's (to return something) and Bangkok Aquarium. Just happened to be playing Thai singer Tata Young's Hits CD as I drove up. 

In line at Fry's, ahead of me is a Sikh in his 30's, and he is all over a tall slender woman in an almost skin-tight pull-over top and tight black pants. Stunning figure from the back, long thick black hair, and she kept going up on her toes and back down again (she was wearing flats, and the two of them are the same height). It showed off her firm little butt, and the fact that she was wearing a thong. Yummy. Very fine hands, and light skin, definitely not Indian. When she turned to the side I could see she was oriental - probably Japanese, judging from the long narrow face and long nose. He was being very proprietary, she wasn't returning it. Interesting is she was returning a DVD, but he was holding the credit card. Very strange couple.

At the aquarium I bought some fish - four female bettas, another Bala Shark, a couple of dark catfish and a male betta. I wanted to test the theory that in a 32-gallon tank, maybe the two males would stake out territory and not kill each other. Also, they tend to breed more when there is another male in sight.

Late afternoon I went back to Janice's and gave her Steve's email list and Quicken file. Something was wrong with the Quicken web site, it wouldn't upload the file for them to de-password. I went over to Steve's condo and tried to crack the password with the boot CD I bought, and though it looked like it was working, it didn't open up the machine. I'll go back again this weekend, and maybe just take the RAID drives and controller home and put them in my PC and access them as non-boot drives. The boot CD had a program which let me see the files, but only in DOS mode, which is tedious.

Got home and found my new Blue Cross ID card in the mail. It should have been there Friday. They left the apartment number off, but my mailman knows me, so that would not have delayed it. They also sent a letter saying they could not assign me my choice for medical group, so they put me with a doctor in San Mateo, 40 miles from my home and in another county! I phoned their customer service but the young woman there was clueless, and was unable to assign any doctor to me. I went online and tried, and found their system is just plain broken. They use a 7-digit physician ID, but the program only wants 6 digits. Wednesday I'll go to the clinic and have them sign me up, or find out why.

Janice gave me Steve's PlayStation2, which I set up after dinner and was not surprised to find a Lord of the Rings game in there. I don't think he had any other games, and it was clear from the dust and the corroded batteries in the wireless controller that Steve had not used the PS2 in ages. The audio for the game is super, the graphics are okay, but I think I need to read the help file to find out how to move the characters. Frodo, in this case. I prefer first person shooters, maybe I'll hit Blockbuster and rent something.

Rounded off the evening watching Ice Pirates on DVD. Peter Urich was pretty hot back in his youth. Mary Crosby wasn't bad, but I liked Anjelica Houston better just a tad bit. Cheap but adequate special effects, obvious rip-off of Mad Max which they went to great lengths to spoof. Nice mindless entertainment.

Speaking of which, ex-wife Marilyn called, we're going to see Superman Returns tomorrow - one of the earlier shows. I've decided not to do anything to celebrate the 4th. Right now the country does not deserve to be celebrated.

Philosophy

My weekly call to Mom & Dad on Sunday was when I broke the news that a friend had suddenly dropped dead. My Dad told me this had happened to one of our family friends not too long ago, and then told me that one of his his closest boyhood pals has Alzheimer's, and is being cared for at home by his wife. And he offered the concept that maybe sudden death is better all around, especially for friends and family, than waking up every morning not knowing who or where you are, or how long you will be that way. 

And I thought "I'll take what's behind door #3". Except we aren't really given a choice, are we?

(no subject)

LJ tells me it's figmo's birthday. Happy Happy!

Review: Superman Returns - no spoilers

Not bad, not good. Superman Returns was okay, casting was somewhat strange - Kevin Spacey's Lex Luthor is matter-of-fact, not at all the maniacal character of the comics. Frank Langella as Perry White is a bit different casting, too. Brandon Routh is a boring Clark Kent and an equally boring Superman.  Kate Bosworth makes an adequate Lois Lane. Sam Huntington is a truly lame Jimmy Olson, and not even a real redhead. The obligatory child actor was totally unsympathetic for me. They did not give him a lot of lines, though.  

The Big Thrill for me is that Noel Neill opens the show - she was the original TV Lois Lane, and told us at WonderCon she would be in this film, but could not say anything about her character. I won't say anything specific except that her voice is almost the same as it was 50 years ago, and they made her up to look even older than she is, if that's possible to believe. She was born in 1920...

Lots of special effects, mostly uninspired, not at all artistic and they did the bare minimum they could to get by. Much of Superman's flying was so on-a-harness it was awful to watch. They did manage a few scenes where they replicated the TV full-figure against blue sky effect. Continuity just plain sucked. Editing was shoddy. Audio was mostly good. Mediocre writing. Cinematography was B-quality. The opening credits made me dizzy, all expenses were spared for the closing credits. Makeup was pretty good except for Lex's bald head, which was obviously shaved (less thoroughly than it needed to be) and not truly bald like the comic book history requires.

The plot has holes in it you can drive a blimp through. Several at once, in some cases. Timing issues, many of them. Some of the events could not possibly have taken place in the time frame the movie claims they did. They never lay a foundation for the whole premise behind Lex's latest evil plot. Lex Luthor  looks too old, Superman too young.

If you haven't already shelled out the $8 for a matinee, wait till it comes out on DVD. And don't move it to the top of your Netflix queue.

PS2

I spent about an hour playing Lord of the Rings on the PlayStation. I'm not good at tracking where I've been, and they don't map in any detail, so it was a lot of time wasted going in circles, returning to the same places and not knowing where in Middle Earth I was. I did manage to get the hang of the basic idea - I had expected it to require an explicit action to pick up things, but in this game all you have to do is be in the same room to get the hint that something you need is there, and then just walk over it or near it to pick it up. When I throw rocks or swing a stick at things, they don't break.

Went to Blockbuster and rented two games, and will try them during the week. Expensive - $8 a week! And they were out of Grand Theft Auto in all its mutations. Will have to look for less costly alternatives. 

Survivor

Survivor
Originally uploaded by how3ird.

Another six on Flickr. This fellow survived the tsunami, and now works in a small roadside open-air restaurant a few feet from the ocean near Kao Lak, PanNga province, southern Thailand.

We ordered shellfish, he went into to water to get them for us.

Strike While The Irony Is Hot

I've become a fan, though a somewhat reserved one,  of Tata Young. She's Thai, and I first got interested in her when i heard a song where she slipped seamlessly between Thai and English. This is very rare, because most Thais just can't pronounce English anywhere close to native speaker level. Ms Young's father is American, which probably accounts for her no-accent English.

Some of her stuff is rap, and somehow, for me at least,  it's more disgusting to hear in Thai than in English. One of her recent albums is called Dangerous Tata (I like the pun) and the title song, Dangerous, is a very clever mixture of Thai and English. She uses a lot of techno, too.

pyrzqxgl pointed me to one of her all-English songs, Cinderella, which I did not listen to closely at first (I was looking for ballads and quiet songs at the time) but now I'm hooked. It's heavy duty rock, and I love the message of self-esteem.
( Lyrics behind the cut )