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Happy Birthday, Pop. We miss you.

It was a long week and I was on call for the weekend so I rented bad movies. Not really bad movies or inventively bad movies but run-of-the-mill Hollywood bad movies. Ones that I could put my head in neutral and watch. And, since I wasn’t leaving the apartment except for food (or fire), these are ones I could get via the cable system’s Movies on Demand. My selections of the weekend’s crap movies:

• Identity. I had hopes for this one, I didn’t expect it to be a junk movie and now I feel cheated. I like John Cusack’s choice of roles and Ray Liotta usually turns in a solid ‘B’ performance but not this time. The previews looked edgy but the movie sputtered halfway through. The actors looked like they phoned in their lines, lots of standing around chewing up the scenery and taking in the Hitchcockian strangeness. I’m not going to spoil the suspense by explaining the that it all hinges upon multiple personality disorder (now there’s a modern deus ex machina) and that the whole movie is one man’s delusion because the that would blunt the disappointment. Who cares what happens to the characters? Apparently, not the screenwriters so they slacked off after the setting up the plot.
• The Italian Job. A very pretty remake starring Mini Coopers. My expectations were low and they were met- chases, gadgets, explosions, joke lines and a straight ahead plot line that doesn’t blink at holes big enough to drive all three Minis through side by side. The only time I wasn’t chuckling and laughing was when Seth Green (Lyle) drops the Ducati. Of course, the original was better but this one just looks so good (except for Edward Norton’s cheesy mustache) that you enjoy the spectacle. And I feel relieved not to have paid $10 to see it.
• Bulletproof Monk. I sought crap and I got it. The movie has a good sense of humor and how can it not? A magic scroll? Flying monks? Nazis? New York City? Mako as the owner of a Chinese movie theater? This movie practically has cheese branded on it. The fight choreography is clever and lifts liberally from the canon of Kung Foo theater with some original (at least to me) use of props. In the end the plot drove down into cutesy, heart-warming rubbish. Nothing’s perfect.

Borrowed from Stephen a copy of The DaVinci Code and sped through it in two days. It’s a fast moving suspense story and very entertaining. Entertaining as long as you don’t think to much about the hundreds of more or less (and often quite less) factual historical details the author Dan Brown intertwines to create a milieu of massive conspiracy that stretches across more than 1500 years. Still, it’s a fun read especially now that the hardcover price has dropped.

I didn’t think much about owning a Mac myself… until now. I had the chance to play with a co-worker’s powerbook and was dumbstruck by OSX- the gorgeous interface and a familiar Unix system underneath. My old laptop crapped out so I bought a decently-equipped Pismo off ebay and the retail box of Panther (OS 10.3) through our employee discount offer.

OSX is smooth, even the install is smooth. Updates are, as expected, smooth. I had a moment of irritation when a software update "lost" my internal airport card in the first reboot (driver incompatibilty). A second reboot restored the airport to working but I wonder if it is a known bug or something I introduced. It’s been otherwise flawless.

Spent a few days tweaking settings and playing with the included software. Xcode is quite cool (and would be more cool if I could get emacs key bindings), so it looks like I’ll have to get a few books on Cocoa and brush up on Objective-C. Loaded on Firebird, OpenOffice, xemacs, fugu, macMAME and a handful of open source command line tools I use. It’s the proving to be the best of everything.

* As a point of accuracy, I do know that the Jonestown tragedy involved "Flavor-aid" not the Kraft product but the phrase is in our lexicon.

Last night at my brother’s place friends of his brought over the funniest card game I have played in years: Apples to Apples. The six of us laughed for a solid two hours.

The concept and play is simple: everyone gets seven cards with nouns on them and the dealer turns over a card from a separate pile with an adjective on it. The players then race to be the first four to throw a card from their hand that best matches the dealt card. The dealer then judges the played cards and the one deemed best- criteria are flexible here, pandering to the judge is suggested- wins the round. The deal shifts and the new dealer fills the player hands for a new round.

It is the perfect word association game- smart, fun, easy, fast and it mixes really well with cocktails. We bought the game and the card expansion pack this evening and plan to bring with us for our holiday visits.