G'night Gracie

That's it for me. I'm off to try one more time to get to the first save point of Castlevania, Circle of the Moon before calling it bedtime. Ta Ta!

Postal Booty

Amazon finally admitted that they were not going to get Jean's Bix Beiderbecke stuff anytime soon, and shipped me my order. Got my copy of James Fallows' Free Flight, about high-tech advances which may change the face of commercial aviation. And I also got my copy of �g�tis byrjun, by Sigur R�s. Gonna play it on infinite loop in the office tomorrow. I'll let you know.

The One

Don't go through the official Sony site, because it makes you go through all sorts of lame Flash guano, slow even on a high-speed connection. But do hunt down and see the trailer for The One. This is Jet Li's next movie, and it looks like a ton of fun.

Okay, Romeo Must Die was a mediocre movie, and the main reason to watch a Jet Li movie, the dazzling martial arts sequences, was severely crippled by the MTV quick-cut editing. I don't think Corey Yuen is a bad martial arts choreographer, so I must blame the director, Andrzej Bartkowiak. He's had a very mixed career, and has even directed Jet Li before, in Lethal Weapon 4. But he just couldn't pull back the camera and show the fights.

Kiss of the Dragon was an improvement, but it still suffered from that MTV effect. Director Chris Nahon's first film, it seems only fair to note that I've heard he in fact was an MTV director before making the leap.

But special effects run rampant in The One, and that is a good thing, since it is clearly the American treatment of that grand old Hong Kong tradition, the flying people movie. Jet plays a cop (original...) who is being stalked by a power-mad killer from an alternate Earth. This killer is...him! And each time the killer kills 'himself', the power of that 'version' is divided up between all the other alternate Jets. Sounds corny, huh? Sounds like an ideal NOVA movie to me.

No Tame Geckoes

Talkin' trash with Kelly this evening I suggested that we could control the bugs around the house by having a few geckoes. Unfortunately it seems they are not tame, and can't be potty-trained. I asked if we couldn't raise a few baby geckoes, since then we could potty-train those. But no, she says if they start out wild, then their children will also be wild, and we can't change that.

So how come we can domesticate horses then? "We give them a m-molecule, that makes them nice, and they can be potty-trained then."

Why not give the geckoes a molecule then? "We don't know about that yet. So there's no molecule to give them. So we can't have geckoes!"

Scratch N' Sniff

That's the title of a recent Farscape episode, and the first one in my queue on my Replay box. I sat down to watch it, and in the first five minutes, I said, "Hey, they're doing a Guy Ritchie homage." Or a rip-off, since there was no credit to him. He didn't direct it, that honor went to Tony Tilse.

Since Guy is pretty hot right now, what with coming off the Indie circuit last year with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (USA release, 1999, actually), then following up with Snatch, and a very funny contribution to the BMW Films series, it's easy to understand why they'd want to tip their hats, being fellow Brits and all, but a written acknowledgement would have been nice too, even if it was bloody obvious who they were copying.

Review Candidates

I've added a list of candidates for anime reviews to the right column of the anime review index. Most of these are candidates for the dual reasons that they seem interesting at first glimpse, and that they are available online, subtitled. My iBook is creaking under the weight of the downloaded files .

Spendthrift

Okay, I promise that this is the last high-ticket item I'll be buying for awhile now (mostly because the Anime Expo Slush Fund is almost gone), but I bought a Bowflex. It's the basic model, but I wanted it because work is getting more demanding lately, and weeks can go by when I don't get to the gym on Mentor's campus. Since strength training is one of the most effective ways I know to keep my back from wigging out, I popped for the home gym. I've just started learning how to use it, but I think it will fill my needs.

But boy are those Bowflex reps on the videos sales-slime! I feel like I'm watching Mike Levy's Amazing Discoveries.