I was going to call this post "Third time lucky" but found the other title more amusing.
So last night, D™ and I went to see Ocean's Thirteen at the moofies. It was much much much better than Ocean's Twelve (which sucked big time) and done with much the same style and slickness as Ocean's Eleven (which we loved, and watched on DVD, several times).
There's this excellent Mexican interlude where Casey Affleck as "young dumb white guy" is doing something mildly dangerous. His coworker says "Es peligroso". He replies with "Peligroso es mi nombre medio" (which had D™ in stitches in the first place), and translates as Dangerous is my medium name.
Apparently it should have been:
Peligro es mi segundo nombre
But seriously, Ocean's 13 is another sequel to a sequel where the sequel to the sequel is waaaay better than the sequel. It was the same with Pirates of the Caribbean - #2 was kind of boring and awful, seemed to be spending more time setting up for #3 than actually making any kind of story, but #3 was pretty fine.
And how about SpideyThree? Spidey was pretty good, SpideyTwo was average, and SpideyThree? Err... it was ok. Not in the same league as the other 3rd-part films we've seen lately.
Oh well. Next on the movie list - another sequel. I wonder if it follows the same rule.
It's been raining a lot lately. So I've been watching Weeds. No, not the garden kind (though that happens too after rain) but the TV kind - a cute little show from the US about a housewife in one of those suburban communities where all the houses are rammed up next to one another and are all built according to the same set of plans. You know the ones. The theme song has been running through my head for *days* now and it's driving not just me but D™ insane. As he puts it, it's bad enough getting a song stuck in your head. It's so much worse when the song stuck is not the actual song but someone else's (i.e. mine) poor reproduction of it.
Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.
Of course the song was written about American suburban development but as in all things cheap and nasty we Australians have to follow suit. Think fast food - until the American franchises started here we had our own excellent burgers at all the local takeaway shops. Burgers should have salad on them. With beetroot. And fresh minced steak. Not plastic cheese in a sweet bun with a frozen semi-meat patty slapped on.
So I'm (still) really glad that we were able to move somewhere that isn't made of ticky tacky but is all bricky bricky. Even though we haven't got a lot of heating yet and as I write this I can see my breath. Indoors. At 9am. I have lots of warm clothes!
Apparently this is the coldest Sydney winter for 8 years. Combine that with our recent moving house experience (from an air conditioned, carpeted townhouse to a double brick, polished floorboards, no heating, awesomely cute freestanding house) - it's *rooly* hard to get out of bed in the mornings.
AFAIK D™ is still *in* bed. He worked late last night on some photo editing for work and decided that entitles him to a sleep-in.
Sigh.
So, I was just investigating some product purchasing for my company and came across this. I suppose it's a built-in geekometer or something. After all, how many products are out there that remind you on each weekly invoice how geeky you are?
... or is it just me ?
*sigh*
It's a curious thing, that you'll be in a serious meeting or something, and then someone says something which triggers a quote from your childhood. I mean, how often do you say "Miss Jane" in response to someone saying "it's upside down"? Or maybe you say "by the rocket clock" when someone tells you the time .... all these things that just make their way into your subconscious.
So when smh published this story about map reading I couldn't stop thinking about Mr Squiggle. Could it be that the reason he could understand the upside-down squiggles but Miss Jane couldn't, was that Mr Squiggle, being a male, had a better ability to mentally rotate the image than Miss Jane? Was it in fact all a terrible reinforcement of a stereotype (which according to smh has now been discovered to be true)?
I must admit that it's taken me a while to be able to interpret maps without turning them around, but that I stopped doing it because if you turn it once, you have to keep turning it, and that just gets tedious - especially if you're driving! Eeek! But for the men who think it's illogical to turn the map around - I just want to say, you're turning it around in your head anyway, so what difference does it make (apart from less brain work) if you turn the map around physically?Hey, don't satellite navigation systems turn around depending on your direction anyway? So does that mean they were designed for women or for men? Or does it indicate who they were designed by?
That could be a question for a later time folks.Back to my rocket clock.